SAHM

Abdal Hakim Murad – Authority within Islam
www.halalmonk.com
Few people in the Islamic world bridge

East and West, tradition and
modernity the way Abdal Hakim
Murad does. He studied and lectured
at both Cambridge and Al-Azhar but
he also sat at the feet of Sufi Shaykhs.
He’s on the board of The Research
Center for Islamic Legislation and
Ethics in Doha but he’s also the Dean
of the Cambridge Muslim College. He
translated important classical works
but he’s also a regular contributor in
the British media. Yet what struck me
the most, when I met him, was the
way he combined vast knowledge and
intellectual sharpness with
straightforward humbleness.
Because of his experiences and expertise, I specifically wanted to talk to shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad
about the evolutions of authority within the global ummah. As the old ‘centers of authority’ are
either non-existent or lost the impact they once had, I hoped to learn from him which institutions or
individuals are gradually becoming new points of reference. His eventual answer, however, wasn’t at
all what I had expected...
It is often claimed Islam has no institutionalized authority but if we honestly look at history we can
see that there have in fact always been certain ‘centers of authority’. The first khalifs, the Al-Azhar
University, the scholars of Damascus, the Ottoman Sultan,… they have all been examples of
concentrated authority. Today, however, it seems very difficult to find such centers or to assess the
authority of the many different groups, institutions and individuals. Would you say then, that
today’s situation is an anomaly in the history of Islam?
If you have a religion with ethics, that religion will want its ethics reflected in the laws and of course
you can’t have a legal system and courts without having some structural authority. Yet in the early
centuries, Islamic law – the sharia – was as decentered as it could possibly be. Each khadi was de
facto independent and there was no statutory legislation.
In the nineteen century, however, the Ottomans had to reshape Islamic law into statutory law
because in order to create a stable trading environment for their European partners they needed
certain treaties and regulations . That led to the establishment of a code called the ‘Mecelle’.
Nowadays many Muslims assume that Islamic law has always been statutory, but in fact it‘s a kind of
‘Westernization’. In the age before the state got involved with legislation it was something that grew
from the ground up. Even more so, originally, the ulama represented the Muslims against the
deprivations of the state.
So historically, despite the oversimplifications, the structure of the religion and its authority has been
detached from the structure and authority of the state. People often tend to think that in Islam,
religion and politics are the same, while in fact there was probably a closer interlocking between
religion and state in many Christian states than in many Islamic parts of the world. In the traditional
Catholic world often the empire and the church were one institution while the Islamic society knew
the strange situation in which the scholars weren’t a part of the imperial bureaucracy. But once
statutory law became the norm worldwide, it was impossible for the scholars to remain independent.
If the state started to legislate – which it wasn’t supposed to do in Islamic law – either they could
take the stance that the state just legislates on the basis of its own secular pragmatism or they could
try to ‘reduce the damage’ by becoming state employees. That led to concepts like ‘the grand Mufti’
of a certain country or ‘the Islamic University’ of a certain state.
Nowadays therefore, the ulama is often integrated into the state’s mechanisms. They have a hard job
not becoming the state’s representatives, putting forward only those fatwa’s that the state approves.
They’ve become a kind of ‘clerisy’ and are often seen as a part of a hypocritical bureaucracy. Hence
the crisis of authority the ‘establishment ulama’ finds itself in.
Probably it leads to much corruption but I suppose corruption must also have existed in the days
before the ulama was integrated into the state structures. Is that, theoretically speaking, really
problematic? Is it, at its core, ‘un-islamic’? One could argue that it is just a different mode of
organization.
The situation the traditional ulama sees us as being in at the moment is a kind of ‘emergency mode’.
In traditional sharia terminology, such a time of emergency is called ‘nawazil’. That’s the category
you apply when there is a huge political misfortune, such as the expulsion of the Muslims in the
Iberian Peninsula by the Spanish Inquisition. All kind of new rulings come into place in such a period
because if you followed the classical fiqh, you’d be killed. And since the models of many of our
present societies are alien to the premises on which the traditional sharia rests, we are considered to
be in such a nawazil period. For example, the traditional sharia assumes the existence of the
extended family. So when the wife is divorced, the husband wasn’t supposed to continually support
her because others would take care of her. Nowadays however, we get into situations where some
people wouldn’t be looked after or cared for. So what do you do when the basic assumptions that
underlie the regulations aren’t prevalent anymore?
The fall of the khalifat was another reason for considering the situation of emergency. Until the
1920’s, less than a hundred years ago, every Sunni Muslim in the world had some dim idea that
behind the diversity of Islam, there was ultimately a unifying principle: the Sultan and the Shaykh al-
Islam of the Ottoman ulama. If you had a dispute in Sunni Islam over doctrine or sharia, theoretically
there was someone who could resolve it. It wasn’t binding, but it was authoritative because it came
from the Shaykh al-Islam. This was eventually abolished by Atatürk and nothing has really stepped in
to replace that.
In a way the abolition of the khalifat certainly proved that the decentered nature of sharia most
certainly remains a strength – that is to say, destroying one part doesn’t do much to the organism as
a whole – because the destruction of the khalifat certainly didn’t destroy Islam. Mosques are still full.
Nonetheless, after a while, the unity of the community on the sensitive nawazil related issues
becomes very doubtful and certain people started to base their fatwa’s too much on their immediate
political circumstances or their psychological state. They let slip the precision instruments of the
classical Islamic jurisprudence on basis of the basic justification of nawazil fiqh – which is ‘to do what
keeps you alive’ – and came up with things like suicide bombing, which is completely inconceivable in
traditional Islamic sensibilities. You’re not even supposed to tattoo your body because it is
sacrosanct, so forget about killing yourself. But the idea of the Palestians, for example, is that there is
no Khalif, that nobody in the world is going to help and that the injustices continue so that they can
only reach for things that would normally not be justifiable. They see it as the only option instead of
just letting the Israelis sit on their head forever.
So in the absence of authority, we see pragmatism winning over morality?
Fundamentalism often coalesces with pragmatism because they do not see themselves bound by the
tradition or the restraint ethos of that tradition. They’re thrown back on the scripture and their own
psychic state and don’t consider the consensus of hundreds of years of cautious scholars. So the
angry man alone in a room with a scripture is, in a sense, more powerful than the scripture on its
own. For the scripture in itself is quite tender, passive and vulnerable and can be twisted into serving
any purpose – which is increasingly what we’re seeing.
If we look at the famous fatwa of Bin Laden against Jews and Crusaders, for instance, which
authorizes every Muslim to kill any American combatant or non-combatant is phrased in a way that
indicates that he had no idea what a traditional fatwa looks like. He doesn’t refer to any of the
classical debates, to any of his predecessors or any consultation of the chain of narration. He just
said: “They’re attacking us so we have to defend ourselves.” Then he quoted a Qur’anic verse that
says we’re indeed allowed to defend ourselves and from it deducted that we can therefore kill
Americans.
It is baseless in terms of traditional Islamic argumentation, but all he had to do to spread his idea,
was to throw his fatwa on the internet. This is something the traditional scholarship can’t really cope
with because that scholarship is so non-hierarchical.
Do you think this situation will change?
As soon as things settle down and people stop panicking, as soon as the drones stop buzzing over our
heads, it becomes evident to the majority of the Muslims that hot-headed efforts of the narrowest
interpretations don’t actually work in practice. It’s a messy thing that hasn’t really ‘delivered’
anywhere. Iran was the first place where it had a chance to prove itself but Iran eventually is one of
the most secular places around when you look at the daily lives of people.
The wiser heads will say that there is much to be gained from reconnecting to tradition and
traditional scholarship. In some cases however, it’s not really accessible. In Libya, for example,
Gaddafi killed it off for forty years. There were some old scholars there but reconnecting teenagers is
really difficult for people in their seventies and eighties.
However, one of the huge advantages of the non-clerical model which Islam favors is that you’re not
stuck when your local spiritual leader is completely uncongenial. You can simply go to another
mosque. And I think part of the resilience of today’s Islam lies in the fact that they can go down the
road to a different mosque and find someone else that does deal with their issues. The danger is of
course that they might be following voices that pander to their insecurities rather than reassuring
them that God is still in control of history.
Would you say then, like some do, that Islam is in bit of a crisis or not?
The merit of the decentered model is to be seen in the fact that in spite of the talk of ‘the crisis of
Islam’ or ‘what went wrong with Islam’ many mosques are still crowded until overflowing. Despite
the decrepitude of the structures, the collapse of traditional Islamic education in many places, people
still want Islam. Even in those places that the West had declared secular.
I think it actually makes many people in the West feel a bit uneasy. Sociologists said it was impossible
since ‘liberated’ people were supposed to want secularism. Yet even though the Tunisian
government for fifty years deliberately tried to squeeze religion out of the Tunisian soul, as soon as
they get the chance, they vote for whoever has the longest beard or quotes the Qur’an. And we can
give more examples. In a country like Turkey, which was very strong in promoting secularism,
mosques are still full. In Europe as well, Muslim minorities are still pretty resistant to many
secularizing tendencies.
We have even come to the point where it becomes difficult to claim that Christianity is still the
default religion. There are churches everywhere, but there is nothing much going on inside them.
Many people are either in the shopping malls or in the mosques.
I therefore don’t accept there is a crisis of Islam. Actually, I think Islam is the great religious success
story of modernity… despite itself. Ultimately you judge a religion and the validity of its truth claims
on the basis of whether it is still appealing to people or not. And people keep converting to Islam.
The Islamic leadership however isn’t at all ready to assume that position. Their discourse, theology or
vision of history isn’t prepared for it. They are still in their nawazil mode of “what’s the latest
headline and how do we panic next?” The cartoons, Israel, terror, … it’s all boiling, but the reality on
the ground is that something is in fact working.
You say Islam is the big success story of modernity but, at the same time, the debates which bring
everything to the ‘boiling point’ are often about the friction between certain tenets of modernity –
like secularism – and the way Islam tries to position itself within society.
Much indeed depends on how the community will respond to the unexpected collapse of the default
religion. Not so much in the US, but certainly in Europe because in Europe the sense is now that the
host society is not ahl al kitab. The people in Europe aren’t seen any longer as ‘people of the book’,
Christian or Jewish, but just as hedonistic. That makes it harder to continue the discourse in
traditional Islamic categories. It also makes the conversation generally more difficult because very
often secularity finds it very hard to develop a language to deal with religious people. The Catholic
Church finds ways of talking to Muslims – sometimes it gets it wrong, but there’s common ground
there – but it’s really hard to converse with this sort of ‘Darwinian fundamentalism’ of the belief in
the selfish gene.
It may well be that, as with the Jewish marginalization, this will secure the distinctiveness and
survival of the Muslim communities. A benign neglect would quite quickly bring about assimilation,
but a sense that the mainstream doesn’t like certain people, makes it easier for those people to
retreat in their own values. They wonder why they should integrate into a society that doesn’t like
them.
I have the feeling that many of the young people that find themselves right in the middle of the
debates on identity, culture, religion and society don’t go to the traditional ulama, their mosques
or the institutions of their community for advice. Instead they seem to turn to inspirational
speakers like Tariq Ramadan, Amr Khaled, Hamza Yussuf, Zakir Naiq and many others who often
draw big crowds. I'm not trying to assess their specific teachings or personalities here, but could it
be said, in general, that such people are becoming somewhat new authoritative figures?
I don’t know. The penetration of their substantive ideas in the normative Muslim communities is very
hard to map. It’s hard to see out there that there are mosques that ‘follow’ them or that there are
organizations, websites or magazines that step in their line.
If you look at the younger generation in the UK, most of them still associate themselves with the
traditional scholars of the subcontinent. They’re fiercely loyal. The number of Muslims who can
detach themselves from their own religious upbringing and who are interested in something
different with a more international character is probably very small – in the UK perhaps forty to fifty
thousand all together. Some of them might attach themselves to certain charismatic speakers and
those speakers can become big stars, so to speak, but there are also others who think the solution is
a Salafi alternative - which has the advantages of being well funded and of having a strong presence
on the internet. And the Salafis can of course do what they like because of the close ties the British
government has with Saudi Arabia.
Is there a bit of a gap then between the traditional scholarship and the ‘inspirational speakers’ or
the leaders of certain movements? And shouldn’t that gap somehow be bridged?
There are many facets to it. A. We live in a time where everything is changing fast. B. Many scholars
aren’t subsidized like they used to be in the past. C. The responsibilities to master the traditional
mechanisms of Islamic law require an immense amount of memorization, patience and wisdom. D.
They need to meaningfully understand the modern world and the place of the religious community
within it. As such it is extremely difficult for the young Muslims to master all of this.
So the scholarship becomes a bit divided between scholars which are westernized but don’t know
the sharia as they should and traditional scholars who are often very cautious about expressing any
views at all about modernity.
When I came to you, I had somehow hoped that to find out more about where the new centers of
authority were really to be found in contemporary Islam. Yet I have the feeling that you think it’s
all quite uncertain, that they are everywhere and nowhere at the moment.
Religion, as you know, is very hard to predict. So when anybody asks: “Where is it going?” I would
have to answer: “God only knows.” The current situation would have been unguessable twenty years
ago.
And where do you place yourself in all of it?
I’m simply an academic of Cambridge and I try my best to be involved in various projects on the local
as well as the international level but it would surprise me that many Muslims in the UK have ever
heard of me. I guess they know my brother a lot better since he’s a famous sports journalist.
Quite a modest answer, considering your standing among the international ulama. Your position
might even surprise certain people since you’re an English convert who places himself within the
Sufi tradition. Yet you’re not the first highly respected scholar I spoke to whose teachers have been
Sufis so, by now, I came to the conclusion that Sufism isn’t at all such a ‘marginalized’ aspect of
Islam as people often claim.
That’s true. If you look at the Ottoman Empire, for example, nobody ever was ‘against’ Sufism. This
concept of Islam being anti-Sufi is there because of Saudi puritanism. But that’s a very recent
evolution. And even Saudi Arabia is full of Sufis. In medina I went to some of the biggest Sufi
gatherings you can imagine.
But it's above all important to remember that it’s not so much about Sufism itself. Sufism is just a
name. The ultimate proof of the religion is the saints. They are the miraculous expressions of divine
love. And it’s through them that we come to know the prophet.
The prophet isn’t just the theory. He has always been a living part of Islam. He was a fully realized,
fully alert, God-send human being who was at the center of his society and miraculously transformed
that society. And after he died, he became the living heart of Muslim piety and most certainly the
center of Sufism. That takes people some time to learn, because in the West they often see Islam as a
regression to some Mosaic style religion, but that whole letter-spirit dichotomy doesn’t make sense
to us. Of course we need letters, because we need boundaries in our lives, we need rules and we
need rituals but there has to be spirit as well. And that spirit is what the prophet is. He is the sharia,
the ethical boundaries, but also the mi’raj, the spiritual ascension.
The saint in Islam is therefore the one who shows you the greatness of the prophet because his life
meticulously conforms to the last detail of the sunna out of total love and surrender. The self is gone
and only the prophetic form remains. The dignity, the ancient wisdom, the selflessness, the love for
others… you see it in the prophet and you see it in the saint.
Did you meet many people who you would call saints like that?
Sure. But they don’t always show up the way you’d want it. Sometimes they’re very scary.
Sometimes they beat you up because that’s what you need and deserve. They take a stick and hit you
until the rubbish comes out.
The Western seeker has this mystical George-Harrison-idea of a white haired sage in a cabin in the
Himalayas who gives you a bit of advice that makes you feel really spiritual and enlightened. But
that’s not the reality of it. The reality is a lot of fasting, tears, shedding blood, being hit… The function
of the teacher is to beat you. The word ‘guru’ in Sanskrit actually means ‘heavy’ but many seekers do
not want that. They want light and smooth spirituality with nice incense and chanting. True saints,
however, sometimes tell you all about yourself. You see them two minutes a year and they can tell
you: “you’ve done this and that while you should do that and this.” They leave you flabbergasted as
to how they knew, you go away and you’re completely shattered and ruined. But it does help you
spiritually advance. And then they go on and help another thousand people.
What do you think is the reason that they are so capable of helping people to spiritually advance?
The saints remind us of the fact that religion is not about doing stuff for the sake of treats after death
but that it’s about consciousness and remembrance now and in every moment. They remind us that
it’s about constantly being in God because in the saints you see the royal qualities and incredible
dignity that that confers. Just being with them makes you kind of reconfigure yourself completely.
So when you see them, you discover what love is really all about. Our culture sings about love
endlessly because it actually doesn’t have any of it. It became the basis of our society but it’s a kind
of coitus interruptus: the slogan of ‘love is all you need’ is everywhere on the covers of magazines, in
music and soap-opera’s but it’s not really there. People need it, they have the yearning, but nothing
is giving it to them so they're sort of endlessly trying new things. I see it with my students. Their
girlfriends dump them and they try again and again… but basically you can love anybody. If you’re
not so fussy about it, you can marry anybody as long as you let God constrain you on the rubbish.
A saint is beyond that sort of narrow minded egocentrism and shows us what real divine love is
about.
Could I conclude then that the true spiritual authorities in Islam, according to you, are in fact the
saints?
Like I often say: “If you have not seen the saint, you have not seen the sunna.”
© Halal Monk 2013
For more conversations with important spiritual leaders and artists of the Muslim World, please visit
www.halalmonk.com
Islam after the Enlightenment Abdal-Hakim Murad
Faith in the future

Islam after the Enlightenment
First Annual Altaf Gauhar Memorial Lecture

Islamabad, 23 December 2002
Abdal-Hakim Murad
December 2002
Bismi’llahi’r-Rahmani’r-Rahim
Your excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, may I express my warm gratitude to you
all for paying me the compliment of attending today? It is particularly gratifying to
me to attend an event in this country, the only state established in recent history
specifically as a homeland for Muslims. It is also a privilege to be associated with
the name of the late and revered Altaf Gauhar, whose translations from the Qur’an
certainly formed, back in the late 1970s, part of my own personal journey towards
Islam
I want to talk about religion - our religion - and address the question of what
exactly is going on when we speak about the prospects of a mutually helpful
engagement between Islam and Western modernity. I propose to tackle this rather
large question by invoking what I take to be the underlying issue in all religious
talk, which is its ability both to propose and to resolve paradoxes.
We might begin by saying that theology is the most ambitious and fruitful of
disciplines because it is all about the successful squaring of circles. Most
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obviously, it seeks to capture, in the limited net of human language, something of

the mystery of an infinite God. Most taxingly, it seeks to demonstrate that an
omnipotent God is also absolutely just, and that an apparently infinite reward or
chastisement can attend upon finite human behaviour. Most scandalously, it holds
that we are more than natural philosophy can describe or know, and that we can
achieve states of being in what we call the soul that are as movingly palpable as
they are inexplicable. The Spirit, as the scriptures tell us, ‘is of the command of our
Lord, and of knowledge you have been given but little.’ (17:85)
So we have a list of imponderables. But to this list the specifically Islamic form of
monotheism adds several additional items. The first of these items is what we call
universalism, that is to say, that Islam does not limit itself to the upliftment of any
given section of humanity, but rather announces a desire to transform
the entire human family. This is, if you like, its Ishmaelite uniqueness: the
religions that spring from Isaac (a.s.), are, in our understanding, an extension of
Hebrew and Occidental particularity, while Islam is universal. Hagar, unlike Sarah,
is half-Egyptian, half-Gentile, and it is she who goes forth into the Gentile world.
Rembrandt’s famous picture of the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael has Sarah
mockingly peering out of a window. She is old, and stays at home; while Hagar is
young, and looks, with her son, towards limitless horizons.
In the hadith, we learn that ‘Every prophet was sent to his own people; but I am
sent to all mankind’ (bu‘ithtu li’l-nasi kaffa). [1] This will demand the squaring of
a circle - in fact of many circles - in a way that is characteristically Islamic. Despite
its Arabian origins, Islam is to be not merely for the nations, but of the nations. No
pre-modern civilisation embraced more cultures than that of Islam - in fact, it was
Muslims who invented globalisation. The many-coloured fabric of the
traditional Umma is not merely part of the glory of the Blessed Prophet, of whom it
is said: ‘Truly your adversary is the one cut off’. (108:3) It also demonstrates the
divine purpose that this Ishmaelite covenant is to bring a monotheism that uplifts,
rather than devastates cultures. Islam brought immense fertility to the Indian
subcontinent, upgrading architecture, cuisine, music, and languages. Nothing could
be more unfair than the Indian chauvinistic thesis, given its most articulate and
insidious voice by V.S. Naipaul, that Islam is a travelling parochialism, an ‘Arab
imperialism’. [2]
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That, then, has been another circle successfully squared - the bringing to the very
different genius of the Subcontinent an uncompromising monotheism which
fertilised, and brought to the region its highest artistic and literary moments.
Mother India was never more fecund than when she welcomed the virility of Islam.
Remember the words of Allama Iqbal:
Behold and see! In Ind’s domain
Thou shalt not find the like again,
That, though a Brahman’s son I be,
Tabriz and Rum stand wide to me. [3]
It is our confidence, moreover, that this triumphant demonstration of Islam’s

universalism has not come to an end. Perhaps the greatest single issue exercising
the world today is the following: is the engagement of Islamic monotheism with
the new capitalist global reality a challenge that even Islam, with its proven ability
to square circles, cannot manage?
As Muslims, of course, we believe that every culture, including the culture of

modern consumer liberalism, stands accountable before the claims of revelation.
There must, therefore, be a mode of behaviour that modernity can adopt that can be
meaningfully termed Islamic, without entailing its transformation into a
monochrome Arabness. This is a consequence of our universalist assumptions, but
it is also an extension of our triumphalism, and our belief that the divine purposes
can be read in history. Wa-kalimatu’Llahi hiya’l-‘ulya - God’s word is uppermost.
(9:40) The current agreement between zealots on both sides - Islamic and
unbelieving - that Islam and Western modernity can have no conversation, and
cannot inhabit each other, seems difficult given traditional Islamic assurances
about the universal potential of revelation. The increasing number of individuals
who identify themselves as entirely Western, and entirely Muslim, demonstrate
that the arguments against the continued ability of Islam to be inclusively universal
are simply false.
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Yet the question, the big new Eastern Question, will not go away this easily.
Palpably, there are millions of Muslims who are at ease somewhere within the
spectrum of the diverse possibilities of Westernness. We need, however, a theory
to match this practice. Is the accommodation real? What is the theological
or fiqh status of this claim to an overlap? Can Islam really square this biggest of all
historical circles, or must it now fail, and retreat into impoverished and hostile
marginality, as history passes it by?
Let us refine this question by asking what, exactly, is the case against Islam’s
contemporary claim to universal relevance? Some of the most frank arguments
have come from right-wing European politicians, as part of their campaign to
reduce Muslim immigration to Europe. This has, of course, become a prime
political issue in the European Union, a local extension of a currently global
argument.
Sometimes one hears the claim that Muslims cannot inhabit the West, or - as
successful participants - the Western-dominated global reality, because Islam has
not passed through a reformation. This is a tiresome and absent-minded claim that
I have heard from senior diplomats who simply cannot be troubled to read
their own history, let alone the history of Islam. A reformation, that is to say, a
bypass operation which avoids the clogged arteries of medieval history and seeks
to refresh us with the lifeblood of the scriptures themselves, is precisely what is
today underway among those movements and in those places which the West finds
most intimidating. The Islamic world is now in the throes of its own reformation,
and our Calvins and Cromwells are proving no more tolerant and flexible than their
European predecessors. [4]
A reformation, then, is a bad thing to ask us for, if you would like us to be more
pliant. But there is an apparently more intelligible demand, which is that we must
pass through an Enlightenment. Take, for instance, the late Dutch politician Pim
Fortuyn. In his book Against the Islamisation of our Culture, he writes:
‘Christianity and Judaism have gone through the laundromat of humanism and
enlightenment, but that is not the case with Islam.’ [5]
Fortuyn is not a marginal voice. His funeral at Rotterdam Cathedral, reverently

covered by Dutch television, attracted a vast crowd of mourners. As his coffin
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passed down the city’s main street, the Coolsingel, so many flowers were thrown
that the vehicle itself almost disappeared from sight, recalling, to many, the scenes
attending the funeral of Princess Diana. The election performance of his party a
week later was a posthumous triumph, as his associate Hilbrand Nawijn was
appointed minister for asylum and immigration. Fortuyn’s desire to close all
Holland’s mosques was not put into effect, but a number of new, highly-restrictive,
policies have been implemented. Asylum seekers now have to pay a seven
thousand Euro deposit for compulsory Dutch language and citizenship lessons. A
90 percent cut in the budget of asylum seeker centres has been approved. An
official government enquiry into the Dutch Muslim community was ordered by the
new parliament in July 2002. [6]
I take the case of the Netherlands because it was, until very recently, a model of
liberalism and multiculturalism. Indeed, modern conceptions of religious toleration
may be said to have originated among Dutch intellectuals. Without wishing to
sound the alarm, it is evident that if Holland can adopt an implicitly inquisitorial
attitude to Islam, there is no reason why other states should not do likewise.
But again, the question has not been answered. Fortuyn, a highly-educated and
liberal Islamophobe, was convinced that Islam cannot square the circle. He would
say that the past genius of Islam in adapting itself to cultures from Senegal to
Sumatra cannot be extended into our era, because the rules of that game no longer
apply. Success today demands membership of a global reality, which means
signing up to the terms of its philosophy. The alternative is poverty, failure, and -
just possibly - the B52s.
How should Islam answer this charge? The answer is, of course, that ‘Islam’ can’t.
The religion’s strength stems in large degree from its internal diversity. Different
readings of the scriptures attract different species of humanity. There will be no
unified Islamic voice answering Fortuyn’s interrogation. The more useful question
is: who should answer the charge? What sort of Muslim is best equipped to speak
for us, and to defeat his logic?
Fortuyn’s error was to impose a Christian squint on Islam. As a practising

Catholic, he imported assumptions about the nature of religious authority that
ignore the multi-centred reality of Islam. On doctrine, we try to be united - but he
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is not interested in our doctrine. On fiqh, we are substantially diverse. Even in the
medieval period, one of the great moral and methodological triumphs of the
Muslim mind was the confidence that a variety of madhhabs could conflict
formally, but could all be acceptable to God. In fact, we could propose as the key
distinction between a great religion and a sect the ability of the former to
accommodate and respect substantial diversity. Fortuyn, and other European
politicians, seek to build a new Iron Curtain between Islam and Christendom, on
the assumption that Islam is an ideology functionally akin to communism, or to the
traditional churches of Europe.
The great tragedy is that some of our brethren would agree with him. There are
many Muslims who are happy to describe Islam as an ideology. One suspects that
they have not troubled to look the term up, and locate its totalitarian and
positivistic undercurrents. It is impossible to deny that certain formulations of
Islam in the twentieth century resembled European ideologies, with their obsession
with the latest certainties of science, their regimented cellular structure, their
utopianism, and their implicit but primary self-definition as advocates of
communalism rather than of metaphysical responsibility. The emergence of
‘ideological Islam’ was, particularly in the mid-twentieth century, entirely
predictable. Everything at that time was ideology. Spirituality seemed to have
ended, and postmodernism was not yet a twinkle in a Parisian eye. In fact, the
British historian John Gray goes so far as to describe the process which
Washington describes as the ‘war on terror’ as an internal Western argument which
has nothing to do with traditional Islam. As he puts it: ‘The ideologues of political
Islam are western voices, no less than Marx or Hayek. The struggle with radical
Islam is yet another western family quarrel.’ [7]
There are, of course, significant oversimplications in this analysis. There are some
individuals in the new movements who do have a substantial grounding in Islamic
studies. And the juxtaposition of ‘political’ and ‘Islam’ will always be redundant,
given that the Islamic, Ishmaelite message is inherently liberative, and hence
militantly opposed to oppression.
Nonetheless, the irony remains. We are represented by the unrepresentative, and

the West sees in us a mirror image of its less attractive potentialities. Western
6|Page
Muslim theologians such as myself frequently point out that the movements which
seek to represent Islam globally, or in Western minority situations, are typically
movements which arose as reactions against Western political hegemony that
themselves internalised substantial aspects of Western political method. In Europe,
Muslim community leaders who are called upon to justify Islam in the face of
recent terrorist activities are ironically often individuals who subscribe to
ideologised forms of Islam which adopt dimensions of Western modernity in order
to secure an anti-Western profile. It is no surprise that such leaders arouse the
suspicion of the likes of Pim Fortuyn, or, indeed, a remarkably wide spectrum of
commentators across the political spectrum.
Islam’s universalism, however, is not well-represented by the advocates of

movement Islam. Islamic universalism is represented by the great bulk of ordinary
mosque-going Muslims who around the world live out different degrees of
accommodation with the local and global reality. One could argue, against
Fortuyn, that Muslim communities are far more open to the West than vice-versa,
and know far more about it. Muslims return from the mosques in Cairo in time for
the latest American soaps. There is no equivalent desire in the West to learn from
and integrate into other cultures. On the ground, the West is keener to export than
to import, to shape, rather than be shaped. As such, its universalism can seem
imperial and hierarchical, driven by corporations and strategic imperatives that
owe nothing whatsoever to non-Western cultures, and acknowledge their existence
only where they might turn out to be obstacles. Likewise, Westerners, when they
settle outside their cultural area, almost never assimilate to the culture which newly
surrounds them. Islam, we will therefore insist, is more flexible than the West.
Where they are intelligently applied, our laws and customs, mediated through the
due instruments of ijtihad, have been reshaped substantially by encounter with the
Western juggernaut, through faculties such as the concern for public interest,
or urf - customary legislation. Western law and society, by contrast, have not
admitted significant emendation at the hands of another culture for many centuries.
From our perspective, then, it can seem that it is the West, not the Islamic world,
which stands in need of reform in a more pluralistic direction. It claims to be open,
while we are closed, but in reality, on the ground, seems closed, while we have
been open.
7|Page
* * *
I think there is force to this defence. But does it help us answer the insistent
question of Mr Fortuyn? Do we have to pass through his laundromat to be made
internally white, as it were, to have an authentic and honoured place of belonging
at the table of the modern reality?
Historians would probably argue that since history cannot repeat itself, the demand
that Islam experience an Enlightenment is strange, and that if the task be
attempted, it cannot remotely guarantee an outcome analogous to that experienced
by Europe. If honest and erudite enough, they may also recognise that the
Enlightenment possibilities in Europe were themselves the consequence of a
Renaissance humanism which was triggered not by an internal European or
Christian logic, but by the encounter with Islamic thought, and particularly the
Islamised version of Aristotle which, via Ibn Rushd, took fourteenth-century Italy
by storm. The stress on the individual, the reluctance to establish clerical
hierarchies which hold sway over earthly kingdoms, the generalised dislike of
superstition, the slowness to persecute for the sake of credal difference: all these
may well be European transformations that were eased, or even enabled, by the
transfusion of a certain kind of Muslim wisdom from Spain.
Nonetheless, it is clear that the Christian and Jewish Enlightenments of the

eighteenth century did not move Europe in a religious, still less an Islamic
direction. Instead, they moved outside the Moorish paradigm to produce a
disenchantment, a desacralising of the world which opened the gates for two
enormous transformations in human experience. One of these has been the
subjugation of nature to the will (or more usually the lower desires) of man. The
consequences for the environment, and even for the sustainable habitability of our
planet, are looking increasingly disturbing. There is certainly an oddness about the
Western desire to convert the Third World to a high-consumption market
economy, when it is certain that if the world were to reach American levels of
fossil-fuel consumption, global warming would soon render the planet entirely
uninhabitable.
The second dangerous consequence of ‘Enlightenment’, as Muslims see it, is the

replacement of religious autocracy and sacred kingship with either a totalitarian
8|Page
political order, or with a democratic liberal arrangement that has no fail-safe

resistance to moving in a totalitarian direction. Take, for instance, the American
Jewish philosopher Peter Ochs, for whom the Enlightenment did away with Jewish
faith in God, while the Holocaust did away with Jewish faith in humanity. As he
writes:
They lost faith in a utopian humanism that promised: ‘Give up your superstitions!
Abandon the ethnic and religious traditions that separate us one from the other!
Subject all aspects of life to rational scrutiny and the disciplines of science! This is
how we will be saved.’ It didn’t work. Not that science and rationality are
unworthy; what failed was the effort to abstract these from their setting in the
ethics and wisdoms of received tradition. [8]
Here is another voice from deep in the American Jewish intellectual tradition that
many in the Muslim world assume provides the staunchest advocates of the
Enlightenment. This time it is Irving Greenberg:
The humanistic revolt for the ‘liberation’ of humankind from centuries of

dependence upon God and nature has been shown to sustain a capacity for demonic
evil. Twentieth-century European civilization, in part the product of the
Enlightenment and liberal culture, was a Frankenstein that authored the German
monster’s being. […] Moreover, the Holocaust and the failure to confront it make a
repetition more likely - a limit was broken, a control or awe is gone - and the
murder procedure is now better laid out and understood. [9]
The West is loath to refer to this possibility in its makeup, as it urges, in Messianic
fashion, its pattern of life upon the world. It believes that Srebrenica, or Mr
Fortuyn, are aberrations, not a recurrent possibility. Muslims, however, surely have
the right to express deep unease about the demand to submit to an Enlightenment
project that seems to have produced so much darkness as well as light. Iqbal,
identifying himself with the character Zinda-Rud in his Javid-name, declaims, to
consummate the final moment of his own version of the Mi‘raj: Inghelab-i Rus u
Alman dide am: ‘I have seen the revolutions of Russia and of Germany!’ [10] This
in a great, final crying-out to God.
9|Page
We European Muslims, born already amid the ambiguities of the Enlightenment,

have also wrestled with this legacy. Alija Izetbegovic, the former Bosnian
president, has discussed the relationship in his book Between East and West. A
lesser-known voice has been that of the Swedish theologian Tage Lindbom, who
died three years ago. Lindbom is particularly important to European Muslim
thought because of his own personal journey. A founder member of the Swedish
Social Democratic Party, and one of the major theorists of the Swedish welfare
state, Lindbom experienced an almost Ghazalian crisis of doubt, and repented of
his Enlightenment ideology in favour of a kind of Islamic traditionalism. In 1962
he published his book The Windmills of Sancho Panza, which generated enough of
a scandal to force him from his job, and he composed the remainder of his twenty-
odd books in retirement. For Lindbom, the liberation promised by the
Enlightenment did not only lead to the explicit totalitarianisms which ruined most
of Europe for much of the twentieth century, but also to an implicit, hidden
totalitarianism, which is hardly less dangerous to human freedom. We are now
increasingly slaves to the self, via the market, and the endlessly proliferating
desires and lifestyles which we take to be the result of our free choice are in fact
designed for us by corporation executives and media moguls.
There can be no brotherhood among human beings, Lindbom insists, unless there
is a God under whom we may be brothers. As he writes: ‘The perennial question is
always whether we humans are to understand our presence on this earth as a vice-
regency or trusteeship under the mandate of Heaven, or whether we must strive to
emancipate ourselves from any higher dominion, with human supremacy as our
ultimate aim.’ [11]
He goes on as follows:
Secularization increasingly becomes identified with two motives: the reduction of

human intelligence to rationalism, and sensual desire; the one is grafted onto the
vertebral nervous system, and the other is a function of the involuntary and
subconscious elements of man’s composite nature. Rationalism and sensualism
will prove to be the mental currents and the two forms of consciousness whereby
secularization floods the Western world. Human pride, superbia, the first and
greatest of the seven deadly sins, grows unceasingly; and it is during the eighteenth
10 | P a g e
century that man begins to formulate the notion that he is discovering himself as
the earthly agent of power. [12]
Lindbom’s works have provoked sharp discussion among Western Muslims in the
universities. Enlightenment leads to sensualism and to rationality. Walter Benjamin
has already seen that it cannot guarantee that these principles will secure a moral
consensus, or protect the weak. It also - and here Lindbom has less to say - yields
its own destruction. Western intellectuals now speak of post-modernism as an end
of Enlightenment reason. Hence the new Muslim question becomes: why jump into
the laundromat if European thinkers have themselves turned it off? Is the Third
World to be brought to heel by importing only Europe’s yesterdays? [13]
These are troubled waters, and perhaps will carry us too far from our purpose in
this lecture. Let me, however, offer a few reflections on what our prospects might
look like if we excuse ourselves the duty of spinning in Mr Fortuyn’s machine.
Islam, as I rather conventionally observed a few minutes ago, speaks with many
voices. Fortuyn, and the new groundswell of educated Western Islamophobia, have
heard only a few of them, hearkening as they do to the totalitarian and the extreme.
Iqbal, I would suggest, and Altaf Gauhar, represent a very different tradition. It is a
tradition which insists that Islam is only itself when it recognises that authenticity
arises from recognising the versatility of classical Islam, rather than taking any
single reading of the scriptures as uniquely true. Ijtihad, after all, is scarcely a
modern invention.
Iqbal puts it this way:
The ultimate spiritual basis of all life, as conceived by Islam, is eternal and reveals
itself in variety and change. A society based on such a conception of Reality must
reconcile in its life the categories of permanence and change. [14]
In other words, to use my own idiom, it must square the circle to be dynamic. The
immutable Law, to be alive, even to be itself, must engage with the mill-wheel of
the transient.
11 | P a g e
One of Altaf Gauhar’s intellectual associates, Allahbakhsh Brohi, used the

following metaphor:
We need a bi-focal vision: we must have an eye on the eternal principles

sanctioned by the Qur’anic view of man’s place in the scheme of things, and also
have the eye firmly fixed on the ever-changing concourse of economic-political
situation which confronts man from time to time. [15]
We do indeed need a bi-focal ability. It is, after all, a quality of the Antichrist that
he sees with only one eye. An age of decadence, whether or not framed by an
Enlightenment, is an age of extremes, and the twentieth century was, in Eric
Hobsbawm’s phrase, precisely that. Islam has been Westernised enough, it
sometimes appears, to have joined that logic. We are either neutralised by a
supposedly benign Islamic liberalism that in practice allows nothing distinctively
Islamic to leave the home or the mosque - an Enlightenment-style privatisation of
religion that abandons the world to the morality of the market leaders and the
demagogues. Or we fall back into the sensual embrace of extremism, justifying our
refusal to deal with the real world by dismissing it as absolute evil, as kufr,
unworthy of serious attention, which will disappear if we curse it enough.
Traditional Islam, as is scripturally evident, cannot sanction either policy.

Extremism, however, has been probably the more damaging of the two. Al-
Bukhari and Muslim both narrate from A’isha, (r.a.), the hadith that runs: ‘Allah
loves kindness is all matters.’ Imam Muslim also narrates from Ibn Mas‘ud, (r.a.),
that the Prophet (salla’Llahu ‘alayhi wa-sallam) said: ‘Extremists shall perish’
(halaka’l-mutanatti‘un). Commenting on this, Imam al-Nawawi defines extremists
as ‘fanatical zealots’ (al-muta‘ammiqun al-ghalun), who are simply ‘too intense’
(al-mushaddidun).
Revelation, as always, requires the middle way. Extremism, in any case, never
succeeds even on its own terms. It usually repels more people from religion than it
holds within it. Attempts to reject all of global modernity simply cannot succeed,
and have not succeeded anywhere. A more sane policy, albeit a more courageous,
complex and nuanced one, has to be the introduction of Islam as a prophetic,
dissenting witness within the reality of the modern world.
12 | P a g e
It should not be hard to see where we naturally fit. The gaping hole in the
Enlightenment, pointed out by the postmodern theologians and by more sceptical
but still anxious minds, was the Enlightenment’s inability to form a stable and
persuasive ground for virtue and hence for what it has called ‘citizenship’. David
Hume expressed the problem as follows:
If the reason be asked of that obedience which we are bound to pay to government,
I readily answer: Because society could not otherwise subsist; and this answer is
clear and intelligible to all mankind. Your answer is, Because we should keep our
word. But besides that, nobody, till trained in a philosophical system, can either
comprehend or relish this answer; besides this, say, you find yourself embarrassed
when it is asked, Why we are bound to keep our word? Nor can you give any
answer but what would immediately, without any circuit, have accounted for our
obligation to allegiance. [16]
But why are we bound to keep our word? Why need we respect the moral law?
Religion seems to answer this far more convincingly than any secular ethic. In
spite of all stereotypes, the degree of violence in the Muslim world remains far less
than that of Western lands governed by the hope of a persuasive secular social
contract. [17] Perhaps this is inevitable: the Enlightenment was, after all, nothing
but the end of the Delphic principle that to know the world we must know and
refine and uplift ourselves. Before Descartes, Locke and Hume, all the world had
taken spirituality to be the precondition of philosophical knowing. Without love,
self-discipline, and care for others, that is to say, without a transformation of the
human subject, there could be no knowledge at all. The Enlightenment, however,
as Descartes foresaw, would propose that the mind is already self-sufficient and
that moral and spiritual growth are not preconditions for intellectual eminence, so
that they might function to shape the nature of its influence upon society. Not only
is the precondition of the transformation of the subject repudiated, but the classical
idea, shared by the religions and the Greeks, that access to truth itself brings about
a personal transformation, is dethroned just as insistently. [18] Relationality is
disposable, and the laundromat turns out to be a centrifuge.
Religion offers a solution to this fatal weakness. Applied with wisdom, it provides
a fully adequate reason for virtue and an ability to produce cultural and political
13 | P a g e
leaders who embody it themselves. Of course, it is all too often applied improperly,
and there is something of the Promethean arrogance and hubris of
the philosophes in the radical insistence that the human subject be enthroned in
authority over scriptural interpretation, without a due prelude of initiation, love,
and self-naughting. Yet the failure of the Enlightenment paradigm, as invoked by
the secular elites in the Muslim world, to deliver moral and efficient government
and cultural guidance, indicates that the solution must be religious. Religious
aberrations do not discredit the principle they aberrantly affirm.
What manner of Islam may most safely undertake this task? It is no accident that
the overwhelming majority of Western Muslim thinkers, including Lindbom
himself, have been drawn into the religion by the appeal of Sufism. To us, the
ideological redefinitions of Islam are hardly more impressive than they are to the
many European xenophobes who take them as normative. We need a form of
religion that elegantly and persuasively squares the circle, rather than insisting on a
conflictual model that is unlikely to damage the West as much as Islam. A purely
non-spiritual reading of Islam, lacking the vertical dimension, tends to produce
only liberals or zealots; and both have proved irrelevant to our needs.
* * *
The most recurrent theme of Islamic architecture has been the dome surmounting
the cube. Between the two there are complex arrangements of arabesques and
pendentives. Religion is worth having because, drawing on the infinite and
miraculous power of God, it can turn a circle into a square in a way that delights
the eye. Through logic and definition the theologian seeks to show how the infinite
engages with the finite. Imam al-Ghazali, and our tradition generally, came to the
conclusion that the Sufi does the job more elegantly, while not putting the
theologian out of a job. But Sufism also, as Iqbal and the consensus of Muslim
theologians in the West have seen, demonstrates other virtues. Because it has been
the instrument whereby Islam has been embedded in the divergent cultures of the
rainbow that is the traditional Islamic world, we may suppose that it represents the
best instrument available for attempting a ‘dissenting’ Muslim embedding within
today’s inexorable global reality. It insists on the acquisition of compassion and
wisdom as a precondition for the exercise of ijtihad, or of any other mode of
14 | P a g e
knowing. Its emphasis on the potential grandeur of man’s condition, of the one
who was ‘taught all the Names’, makes it more humane than any secular
humanism. In short, its recognition of the limitations of rational attempts to square
the circle of speaking of the metaphysical and in justifying virtue, can bring us to
real, rather than illusory, enlightenment, to a true ishraq. This is because there is
only one ‘Light of the heavens and the earth.’ (24:35) Seeking truth in the many,
while ignoring the One, is the cardinal, Luciferian error. Its consequences for
recent human history have already been tragic. Its prospects, as it yields more and
more methods of destruction, and fewer and fewer arguments for a universal
morality, are surely unnerving. Genetic engineering now threatens to redefine our
very humanity, precisely that principle which the Enlightenment found to be the
basis of truth. In such a world, religion, for all its failings, is likely to be the only
force which can genuinely reconnect us with our humanity, and with our fellow
men.
Wa’Llahu’l-Musta‘an.
NOTES
1. Bukhari, Tayammum, 1.
2. The view is expounded most forcefully in his recent Beyond Belief: Islamic
Excursions among the Converted Peoples (London, 1998). For a refutation see T.J.
Winter, ‘Some thoughts on the formation of British Muslim
identity’, Encounters 8:1 (2002), 3-26.
3. Persian Psalms (Zabur-i ‘Ajam), translated into English verse from the Persian
of the late Sir Muhammad Iqbal by Arthur J. Arberry. (Lahore, 1948), 8.
4. The defining demand of the Reformation was the return to the most literal
meaning of Scripture. Hence Calvin: ‘Let us know, then, that the true meaning of
Scripture is the natural and simple one, and let us embrace and hold it resolutely.
Let us not merely neglect as doubtful, but boldly set aside as deadly corruptions,
those pretended expositions which lead us away from the literal sense.’ (John
15 | P a g e
Calvin, The Epistles of Paul to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and

Colossians (Edinburgh, 1965), 84-5. Is this what the West is demanding of us?
That a Muslim state should, in consequence, be a ‘city of glass’, like Calvin’s
terrified Geneva?
5. Cited in Angus Roxburgh, Preachers of Hate: The Rise of the Far Right.
(London, 2002), 163.
6. Roxburgh, 160, 169, 174.
7. The Independent July 28, 2002.
8. Peter Ochs, ‘The God of Jews and Christians’, in Tikva Frymer-Kensky et

al., Christianity in Jewish Terms (Boulder and Oxford, 2000), 54.
9. Irving Greenberg, ‘Judaism, Christianity and Partnership after the Twentieth

Century’, in Frymer-Kensky, op. cit., 26.
10. Iqbal, Javid-Nama, translated from the Persian with introduction and notes, by
Arthur J. Arberry (London, 1966), 140.
11. Tage Lindbom, The Myth of Democracy (Grand Rapids, 1996), 18.
12. Ibid., 22.
13. The implications of the collapse of Enlightenment reason for theology have
been sketched out by George Lindbeck in his The Nature of Doctrine: religion and
theology in a postliberal age (London, 1984), and (for a more Islamic turn,
because explicitly resistant to those Renaissance-Aristotelian confidences of
Suarez which took Thomism so far from kalam) in the several works of Jean-Luc
Marion. The Ash‘arite resonances are clear enough: discourse is self-referential
unless penetrated by the Word.
14. Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, cited in Allahbakhsh

Brohi, Iqbal and the Concept of Islamic Socialism (Lahore, 1967), 7.
15. Brohi, op. cit., 7.
16 | P a g e
16. David Hume, Essays (Oxford, 1963), 469.
17. For example, the 2002 World Health Organisation document World Report on
Violence and Health, shows the murder rate in the Eastern Mediterranean region to
be less than half the rate for the Americas.
See http://www5.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/download.cfm?id=00000005
59, page 7.
18. This has been discussed with particular clarity by Michel

Foucault, L’Hermeneutique du sujet: Cours au College de France (1981-2) (Paris,
2001), pp.16-17. Foucault’s pessimism might be further reinforced by considering
the corrosive implications of the new biology, with its anti-egalitarian potential, for
secular reasons for conviviality and mutual respect. Cf. W.D. Hamilton, Narrow
Roads of Gene Land, vol. II (Oxford, 2001), for whom evolutionary theories ‘have
the unfortunate property of being solvents of a vital societal glue.’
17 | P a g e
Islam and the New Millennium Sh. Abdal Hakim Murad
Islam and the New Millennium

Abdal-Hakim Murad
This essay is based on a lecture given at the Belfast Central Mosque in March 1997.
Whoever is not thankful for graces

runs the risk of losing them;
and whoever is thankful,
fetters them with their own cords.
(Ibn Ata'illah, Kitab al-Hikam)
'Islam and the New Millennium' - rather a grandiose subject for an essay, and
one which, for Muslims, requires at least two caveats before we can even begin.
Firstly, the New Millennium - the Year 2000 - is not our millennium. Regrettably,
most Muslim countries nowadays use the Christian calendar devised by Pope
Gregory the Great, and not a few are planning celebrations of some kind. Many
confused and secularised people in Muslim countries are already expressing a good
deal of excitement: in Turkey, there is even a weekly magazine called Iki Bin'e
Dogru(Straight to 2000). This semi-hysteria should be of little interest to us: as
Muslims we have our own calendar. The year 2000 will in fact begin during the
1|Page
year 1420 of the Hijra. So why notice the occasion at all? Isn't this just another
example of annoying and irrelevant Western influence?
This point becomes still sharper when we remember that according to most modern
scholars, Jesus (a.s.) was in fact born in the year 4 B.C. Thus 1996, not 2000,
marked the second millennium of his advent. The celebrations in two years time
will in fact mark an entirely meaningless date: a postmodern festival indeed.
The second, more imponderable reservation, concerns our ability to speak reliably
about the future at all. In this paper I propose to speculate about the directions
which Islam may take following the great and much-hyped anniversary. But the
theological question is a sharp one: can we do this in a halal way? The future is in
the ghayb, the Unseen; it is known only to Allah. And it may well be that the
human race will not reach the year 2000 at all. Allah is quite capable of winding
the whole show up before then. The hadith of Jibril describes how the angel came
to the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) asking when the Day of
Judgement would come, and he only replied, 'The one questioned knows no more
of it than the questioner.' But as the Holy Qur'an puts it, 'the very heavens are
bursting with it.' It may well be tomorrow.
Apocalyptic expectations are not new in Islamic history: they appeared, for
instance, in connection with the Islamic millennium. Imam al-Suyuti, the greatest
scholar of medieval Egypt, was concerned about the nervous expectations many
Muslims had about the year 1000 of the hijra. Would it herald the end of the
world, as many thought?
Imam al-Suyuti allayed these fears by examining all the hadith he could find about
the lifetime of this Umma. He wrote a short book which he called al-Kashf an
mujawazat hadhihi al-umma al-Alf ('Proof that this Umma will survive the
millenium'). He concluded that there was no evidence that the first millenium of
Islam would end human history. But rather soberingly for our generation, he
speculates that the hadiths at his disposal indicate that the signs which will usher in
the return of Isa (a.s.), and the Antichrist (al-Masih al-Dajjal), are most likely to
appear in the fifteenth Islamic century; in other words, our own.
2|Page
But all these speculations were submissive to the Imam's deep Islamic awareness
that knowledge of the future is with Allah; and only Prophets can prophesy.
What I shall be doing in the pages that follow, then, is not forecast, but extrapolate.
Allah ta'ala is capable of changing the course of history utterly, through some
natural disaster, or a series of disastrous wars. He can even end history for good. If
that happens in the next three years, then my forecasts will be worthless. All I am
doing is, in a sense, to talk about the present, inasmuch as present trends,
uninterrupted by catastrophe, seem set to continue in the coming few years and
decades.
Why is it useful to reflect on these trends? Because I think we all recognise that the
Muslims have responded badly and largely unsuccessfully to the challenges of the
twentieth century; in fact, of the last three centuries. Faced with the triumph of the
West, we have not been able to work out which changes are inevitable, and which
can be resisted.
For instance, in the early nineteenth century the Ottoman empire lost a series of
disastrous wars against Russia. The main reason was the superior discipline and
equipment maintained by modern European armies. But the ulema, and the
janissary troops, resisted any change. They believed that battles were won by faith,
and that firearms and parade grounds diminished the virtue of futuwwa, the
chivalric, almost Samurai-like code of the individual Muslim warrior. To shoot at
an enemy from a distance rather than look him in the eye and fight with a sword
was seen as a form of cowardice. Hence the Ottoman army continued to sustain
defeat after defeat at the hands of its better-equipped Christian enemies.
Another case in point was the controversy over printing. Until the eighteenth
century a majority of ulema believed that printing was haram. A text, particularly
one dealing with religion, was something numinous and holy, to be created slowly
and lovingly through the traditional calligraphic and bookbinding crafts. A ready
availability of identical books, the scholars thought, would cheapen Islamic
learning, and also make students lazy about committing ideas and texts to memory.
Further, it was thought that the process of stamping and pressing pages was
disrespectful to texts which might contain the name of the Source of all being.
3|Page
It took a Hungarian convert to Islam, Ibrahim Muteferrika, to change all this.

Muteferrika obtained the Ottoman Caliph's permission to print secular and
scientific books, and in 1720 he opened Islam's first printing press in Istanbul.
Muteferrika was a sincere convert, describing his background and religious beliefs
in a book which he called Risale-yi Islamiyye. He was also very concerned with the
technical and administrative backwardness of the Ottoman empire. Hence he wrote
a book entitled Usul al-Hikam fi Nizam al-Umam, and published it himself in 1731.
In this book he describes the governments and military systems prevailing in
Europe, and told the Ottoman elite that independent Muslim states could only
survive if they borrowed not only military technology, but also selectively from
European styles of administration and scientific knowledge.
Ibrahim Muteferrika's warnings about the rise of European civilisation were slowly
heeded, and the Ottoman state set about the controversial business of modernizing
itself, while attempting to preserve what was essential to its Islamic identity.
Muteferrika's story reminds us that unless Muslims are conscious of the global
trends of their age, they will continue to be losers. My own experience of Muslims
has suggested that we are endlessly fascinated by short-term political issues, but
are largely ignorant of the larger tendencies of which these issues are simply the
passing manifestations.
This ignorance can sometimes be astonishing. How many leaders in the Islamic
world are really familiar with the ideas which underpin modernity? I have met
some leaders of activist factions, and have been consistently shocked by their lack
of knowledge. How many can even name the principal intellectual systems of our
time? Structuralism, post-modernism, realism, analytic philosophy, critical theory,
and all the rest are closed books to them. Instead they burble on about the
'International Zionist Masonic Conspiracy', or 'Baha'ism', or the 'New Crusader
Invasion', or similar phantasms. If we want to understand why so many Islamic
movements fail, we should perhaps begin by acknowledging that their leaders
simply do not have the intellectual grasp of the modern world which is the
precondition for successfully overcoming the obstacles to Islamic governance. A
Muslim activist who does not understand the ideologies of modernism can hardly
hope to overcome them.
4|Page
A no less lamentable ignorance prevails when it comes to non-ideological trends in

the late twentieth century, and which are likely to prevail in the new millennium.
And hence I make no apologies for discussing them in this paper. Like Ibrahim
Mutefarrika three centuries ago, I am concerned to alert Muslims to the realities
which are taking shape around them, and which are moulding a world in which
their traditional discourse will have no application whatsoever. It is suicidal to
assume that we will be insulated from these realities. Increasingly, we live in one
world, thanks to a mono-culturising process which is accelerating all the time.
There is a mosque in Belfast now, and there is also a branch of MacDonalds in
Mecca. We may be confident in our faith and assumptions, but what of many of
our young people? What happens to the young Muslim student at an American
university? He learns about post-modernism and post-structuralism, and that these
are the ideologies of profound influence in the modern West. He asks the Islamic
activist leaders how to disprove them, and of course they cannot. So he grows
confused, and his confidence in Islam as a timeless truth is shaken. Under such
conditions, only the less intelligent will remain Muslim: a filtering process which
is already painfully evident in some activist circles.
It is, therefore, an obligation, a farida, to understand the processes which are under
way around us.
To summarise the leading trends of our age is beyond the ambitions of this short
paper. I will focus, therefore, on just a few representative issues, not because I can
deal with them fully, but simply to suggest the nature of the challenges for which
the Umma should prepare over the next few decades. These three issues are:
demography, religious change, and the environment.
Let me deal with the demographic issue first, because in a sense it is the most
inexorable. Population trends are easily extrapolated, and the statistics are
abundant for the past hundred years at least. Projections are reliable unless
catastrophe supervenes: epidemics, for instance, or destructive wars. I will assume
that neither of these things will assume sufficient proportions to affect the general
picture.
5|Page
Here are some figures taken from D. Barrett's World Christian Encyclopedia,
published by Oxford University Press in 1982. I will set them out in text rather
than tabular form, in case the format does not survive Web downloading.
In 1900, 26.9% of the world's population was Western Christian, while Islam
accounted for 12.4%. In 1980 the figures were 30% and 16.5% respectively. The
projection for 2000 is 29.9% and 19.2%. Percentages for other religions are fairly
static, and since 1970 the total of atheists has, surprisingly perhaps, experienced a
slow decline.
These figures are of considerable significance. Over the course of this century, the
absolute proportion of Muslims in the world has jumped by a quite staggering
amount. This has come about partly through conversion, but more significantly
through natural increase. And the demographic bulge in the modern Muslim world
means that this growth will continue. Here, for instance, is the forecast of Samuel
Huntington in his new and resolutely Islamophobic book The Clash of
Civilizations (pp.65-6):
"The percentage of Christians in the world peaked at about 30 percent in the

1980s, leveled off, is now declining, and will probably approximate about
25% of the world's population by 2025. As a result of their extremely high
rates of population growth, the proportion of Muslims in the world will
continue to increase dramatically, amounting to 20 percent of the world's
population about the turn of the century, surpassing the number of Christians
some years later, and probably accounting for about 30 percent of the
world's population by 2025."
It is not hard to see why this is happening. America and Europe have increasingly
aging populations. In fact, one of the greatest social arguments of the new
millennium will concern the proper means of disposing of the elderly. Medical
advances ensure an average lifetime in the high seventies. However active
lifetimes have not grown so fast. At the turn of the century, a Westerner could
expect to spend an average of the last two years of life as an invalid. Today, the
figure is seven years. As Ivan Illich has shown, medicine prolongs life, but does
not prolong mobility nearly as well. These ageing populations with their healthcare
6|Page
costs are an increasing socio-economic burden. The UK Department of Health

recently announced that a new prescription drug for Alzheimer's Disease is
available on the National Health Service - but its cost means that it is only
available to a selected minority of patients.
In the West's population is top-heavy, that of Islam is the opposite. Today, more
than half the population of Algeria, for example, is under the age of twenty, and
the situation is comparable elsewhere. These young populations will reproduce,
and perpetuate the percentage increase of Muslims well into the next millennium.
Hence, to take an example, in the Maghrib between 1965 and 1990, the population
rose from 29.8 million to 59 million. During the same period, the number of
Egyptians increased from 29.4 million to 52.4 million. In Central Asia, between
1970 and 1993, populations grew at annual rates of 2.9 percent in Tajikistan, 2.6
percent in Uzbekistan, 2.5 percent in Turkmenistan, and 1.9 percent in Kyrgyzia.
In the 1970s, the demographic balance in the Soviet Union shifted drastically, with
Muslims increasing by 24 percent while Russians increased by only 6.5 percent.
Almost certainly this is one reason why the Russian empire collapsed: Moscow
had to detach its Muslim areas before their numbers encouraged them to dominate
the system. Even in Russia itself, Muslims (Tatars, Bashkirs, and Chuvash, as well
as immigrants) are very visible, accounting for over 10 percent of the populations
of both Moscow and St Petersburg.
This reminds us that the increase in the Muslim heartlands will have a significant
impact in Muslim minority areas as well. In some countries, such as Tanzania and
Macedonia, the Muslims will become a majority within twenty years. Largely
through immigration, the Muslim population of the United States grew sixfold
between 1972 and 1990. And even in countries where immigration has been
suppressed, the growth continues. Last year, seven percent of babies born in
European Union countries were Muslims. In Brussels, the figure was a staggering
57 percent. Islam is already the second religion of almost every European state -
the only exceptions being those European countries such as Azerbaijan and
Albania where it is the majority religion. If current trends continue, then an overall
ten percent of European nationals will be Muslim by the year 2020.
7|Page
What is the significance of this global change? Does it in fact entail anything at
all? After all, there is a famous hadith narrated by Abu Daud on the authority of
Thawban, which says that the day will come when the Muslims will be numerous,
but will be like froth and flotsam (ghutha') carried along by a flash-flood.
It is true that sheer weight of numbers counts for much less today than it did, say, a
couple of hundred years ago, when military victories depended as much on
numbers as on technology. Napoleon could say that 'God is on the side of the
larger battalions' - but nowadays, when huge numbers of soldiers can be eliminated
by push-button weapons, this is no longer the case; a fact demonstrated by Saddam
Hussein's hopeless and absurd defiance during the recent conflict over Gulf oil
supplies.
The rapid increase in Muslim numbers does, however, have important entailments.
But for this, the UN would not have chosen Cairo, the world's largest Muslim city,
as the site of its 1994 Population Conference. There is still some safety in numbers.
But more significant than mere numbers is the psycho-dynamic of population
profiles. Aging populations become introspective and flaccid. Young populations
are more likely to be energetic, and encourage national political assertiveness.
The new millennium will dawn over a Muslim world with disproportionately
young populations. Moreover, these populations will be increasingly urban. And
such situations historically have always bred instability, turmoil, and reform. One
explanation for the Protestant reformation in Europe is based on the preponderance
of young people in urban sixteenth-century Germany, the result of new agricultural
and political arrangements. The growth of fascism in Central Europe in the 1930s
is also attributed in part to the growth in the number of young people. And in
Islamic history, one thinks of the example of the Jelali rebellions in the sixteenth
and seventh century: once the great Ottoman conquests had ceased, the young men
who would have been occupied in the army found themselves at a loose end, and
launched a variety of sectarian or social protest movements that devastated large
areas of Anatolia.
The Islamic revival over the past few years has faithfully reflected this trend. One
of the first Muslim countries to reach a peak proportion of youth was Iran, in the
late 1970s (around 22% of the population), and the revolution occurred in 1979. In
8|Page
other countries the peak was reached rather later: in Algeria this proportion was
reached in 1989, just when the FIS was winning its greatest support.
Following the millennium, this youth bulge will continue in many Muslim
societies. The number of people in their early twenties will increase in Egypt,
Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, and several other countries. As compared to 1990, in the
year 2010 entrants to the jobs market will increase by about 50% in most Arab
lands. The unemployment problem, already acute, will become intolerable.
This rapid growth is likely to render some states difficult to govern. The bunker
regimes in Cairo and Algiers are already confronting rebellions which have clear
demographic as well as moral and religious dimensions. So the first probable
image we have of the next millenium is: in the West, aging and static populations,
with stable, introspective political cultures; and in the Islamic world, a population
explosion, and established regimes everywhere under siege by radicals.
The next consideration has to be: will the bunker regimes survive? This is harder to
comment upon, although many political scientists with an interest in the Islamic
world have tried. Before the modern period, peasant revolts stood a good chance of
success, because manpower could carry the day against the ruler's army. Today,
however, advances in technology have made it possible for military regimes to
survive indefinitely in the face of massive popular discontent. Spend enough
money, and you can defeat even the most ingenious infiltrator or the most
populous revolt. This technology is becoming cheaper, and is often supplied on a
subsidised basis to the West's favoured clients in the Third World. Similarly,
techniques of interrogation and torture are becoming far more refined, and have
proved an effective weapon against underground movements in a variety of
places.
Let me give you an example. Last year's Amnesty International report explains that
in January 1995, the US government licenced the export to Saudi Arabia of a range
of security equipment including the so-called 'taser' guns. 'These guns shoot darts
into a victim over a distance of up to five metres before a 40-50,000 volt shock is
administered. These weapons are prohibited in many countries, including the UK.
9|Page
Another example, also documented by Amnesty, is the export in 1990 of a

complete torture chamber by a UK company, which was installed in the police
special branch headquarters in Dubai. This is known in the Emirates as the 'House
of Fun'. The Amnesty report describes it as 'a specially constructed cell fitted with
a terrifyingly loud sound system, a white-noise generator and synchronized strobe
lights designed to pulse at a frequency that would cause severe distress.'
These are just two examples of the increasing sophistication of torture equipment
now being supplied to the bunker regimes. One could add to this list the improving
techniques of telecommunications surveillance.
But what about the Internet? Isn't the Internet the ultimate freedom machine,
allowing the pervasion of all types of dissent, from anywhere in the world, to
anywhere in the world?
At the moment the Internet is only available in a few Muslim countries. Already
there are indications that monitoring of the phone lines which carry the signals is in
progress. The centralizing nature of the Internet is in fact tailormade for intrusive
regimes. A fairly straightforward programme on a mainframe computer logged on
to the telephone net can inform the security forces instantaneously if a forbidden
site is being accessed. Once that is established, investigation and arrest are a matter
of course.
I believe that as technology improves, including ever more massive surveillance

systems, it seems quite likely that the regimes will be able to suppress any amount
of dissent, on one condition - that it does not spread to the armed forces. The Shah
fell because his army turned against him, not because of the protests on the streets.
But in Algeria the revolution has been suppressed, largely because the radicals
think they can overwhelm a modern state without support from the armed forces.
The societies governed in this way are now experiencing severe traumas and
cultural distortions. They are sometimes called 'pressure-cooker cultures'. The
consequences for the human soul of being subjected to this kind of pressure are
quite alarming, and already in the Muslim world we see manifestations of extreme
behaviour which only a decade ago would have been unthinkable.
10 | P a g e
This is not the context for providing full details of the problem of 'extremism', or
what traditional Islam would call ghuluww. But it is clearly a growing feature of
our religious landscape, and I will have to deal with it in passing. In early Islam the
movement known as Kharijism fought against the khalifa Ali for the sake of a
utopian and purist vision of Muslim society. Today, tragically, the Khawarij are
with us once more. I have in mind incidents such as the 1994 shooting in
Omdurman, when Wahhabi activists opened fire on Friday worshippers in the
Ansar al-Sunna mosque, killing fourteen. Ironically, the mosque was itself Salafi,
but followed a form of Wahhabism that the activists did not consider sufficiently
extreme.
In Algeria, too, throat-slittings and massacres of villagers, and fighting between

rival groups, have transformed large areas of the country into a smoking ruin.
We sometimes like to dismiss these movements as marginal irrelevancies.

However, the signs are that until the conditions which have bred them are
removed, they will continue to grow. The mainstream Islamic movements are seen
to have failed to achieve power, and desperate young people are turning to more
radical alternatives. It is fairly clear that a growing polarisation of Muslim society,
and of the Muslim conscience, will be a hallmark of the coming century.
What is the defining symptom of Kharijism? In a word, takfir. That is, declaring
other Muslims to be beyond the pale, and hence worthy of death. This tendency
was attacked vigorously by the ulema of high classical Islam. For instance, Imam
al-Ghazali, in his book Faysal al-Tafriqa bayn al-Islam wa'l-Zandaqa explained
that it is extremely difficult to declare anyone outside Islam for as long as they
say La ilaha illa'Llah, Muhammadun rasulu'Llah. And today, Sunni schoolchildren
in many countries still memorise creeds such as the Jawharat al-Tawhid of Imam
al-Laqqani, which include lines like:
idh ja'izun ghufranu ghayri'l-kufri

fa-la nukaffir mu'minan bi'l-wizri
since forgiving what is not unbelief is possible,

as we do not declare an unbeliever any believer on account of a sin.
11 | P a g e
wa-man yamut wa-lam yatub min dhanbihi

fa-amruhu mufawwadun li-rabbihi
Whoever dies and has not repented of his sin,

his matter is turned over to his Lord.
The legitimation of differences in fiqh was rooted in the understanding of ijtihad.

And differences in spiritualities were justified by the Sufis in terms of the idea
that al-turuq ila'Llah bi'adadi anfas al-khala'iq ('there are as many paths to God as
there are human breaths'). As Ibn al-Banna', the great Sufi poet of Saragossa
expressed it, ibaraatuna shatta wa-husnuka wahidun, wa-kullun ila dhak al-jamali
yushiru ('our expressions differ, but Your beauty is one, and all are pointing
towards that Beauty').
Diversity has always been a characteristic of Islamic cultures. It was only medieval
Christian cultures which strove to suppress it. However, there is a growing
tendency nowadays among Muslims to favour totalitarian forms of Islam.
'Everyone who disagrees with me is a sinner, cries the young activist, 'and is going
to hell'.
This mentality recalls the Kharijite takfir, but to understand why it is growing in
the modern umma, we have to understand not just the formal history, but the
psychohistory of our situation. Religious movements are the expression not just of
doctrines and scriptures, but also of the hopes and fears of human collectivities. In
times of confidence, theologies tend to be broad and eirenic. But when the
community of believers feels itself threatened, exclusivism is the frequent result.
And never has the Umma felt more threatened than today.
Even in the UK, the takfir phenomenon is growing steadily. There are factions in
our inner cities which believe that they are the only ones going to Heaven. 99% of
people who call themselves Muslims are, in this distasteful insult to Allah's moral
coherence, not Muslims at all.
We can understand this psychic state more easily when we recognise that it exists
universally. Not just in Islam, but in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and
Buddhism, there is a conspicuous tendency towards factional excluvisism. In
12 | P a g e
Christianity, one has to look no further than the Branch Davidians of David
Koresh, 89 of whom died when their ranch in Texas was stormed by US troops
three years ago. The Davidians believed that they were the sole true Christians -
everyone else would burn in Hell.
In Japan, even the usually peaceful religion of Buddhism has been re-formed by
this tendency. In early 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo sect released Sarin nerve gas onto
the Tokyo underground system, killing eleven people and sending 5,500 to
hospital. Their guru, Shoko Asahara, had for ten years been preaching the need to
overthrow the corrupt order in Japan, and transform the country into the true
Shambala. As he said, 'Our sphere shall extend throughout the nation, and foster
the development of thousands of right-believing people.' In his book From
Destruction to Emptiness he explains that only those who believe in authentic,
pristine Buddism as taught by Aum can expect to survive the corruption and
destruction of the world. Non-Aum Buddhists are not true Buddhists at all.
On the basis of this kind of takfir, he and his 12,000 followers bought a factory
complex on the slopes of Mount Fuji, where they successfully manufactured nerve
gas and the botulism virus. The sinners of Japan's un-Buddhist culture would be
the first to suffer, they thought, but they also laid extensive plans for terrorist
actions in North America. It is claimed that had the sect been allowed to operate
for another six months, tens of thousands of people might have died from the sect's
attacks in the United States, which was seen as the great non-Buddhist source of
evil darkening the world.
It is important to note the close parallels between Aum Shinryo-kyo and the
modern takfir groups in the Middle East. The diagnosis is the same: the pure
religion has been ignored or distorted by an elite, and the process has been
masterminded by Americans. Hence the need to retreat and disown society - the
idea of Takfir wa'l-Hijra that informed Shukri Mustafa's group in late 1970s Egypt.
In secretive inner circles, the saved elect gather to plan military-style actions
against the system. They are indifferent to the sufferings of civilians - for they are
apostates and deserve death anyway. Such attacks will prefigure, in some rather
vague and optimistic fashion, the coming to power of the true believers, and the
suppression of all other interpretations of religion.
13 | P a g e
This idea of takfir wa'l-hijra is thus, in structural terms, a global phenomenon. Its
members are usually educated, almost always having science rather than arts
backgrounds. Technology is not disowned, but sedulously cultivated. Bomb-
making becomes a disciplined form of worship.
I believe that this tendency, which has been fostered rather than eliminated by the
repressiveness of the regimes, will grow in relative significance as we traverse the
end of the century. It will continue to besmirch the name of Islam, by shooting
tourists, or blowing up minor targets in pinprick attacks that strengthen rather than
weaken the regimes. It will divide the Islamic movement, perhaps fatally. And it
will provide the regimes with an excuse further to repress and marginalise religion
in society.
The threat of neo-Khariji heresy is thus a real one. It will exist, however, against
the backdrop of an even more worrying transformation. It is time now to look at
the last of our three themes: the apparently disconnected subject of the degradation
of the natural environment, one of the great neglected Islamic issues of our time -
arguably even the most important of all.
There are a whole cluster of questions here. Clearly, as we leave the second
millennium, the planet is in abjectly poor physical shape as compared to the year
1000. Materialism, enabled by Reformation notions of the world as fallen, and by
protestant capitalistic ethics, has presided over the gang rape of Mother Earth.
Everywhere the face of the planet is scarred. Megatons of tons of toxic waste are
now circulating in the oceans, or hovering in the stratosphere. Hormone and
plastics pollution has resulted in a 50% drop in male fertility in the UK. Every day,
another 12 important species become extinct. Every form of life apart from our
own, and perhaps domestic animals, has been decimated by the holocaust of
modernity. The BSE disaster is a hint of what may be in store: Government
analysts have confirmed that as many as 30,000 British people may contract
Creuzfeld-Jakob disease as a result of eating contaminated beef. As technology
advances, similar scientific blunders may well wipe out large sections of the
human race.
But the most urgent and undeniable environmental issue which we carry with us
into the new millennium is that of global warming. For a hundred years we have
14 | P a g e
been pumping greenhouse gases into the skies, and are now beginning to realise
that a price has to be paid. We need to focus close attention on this issue, not least
because it will affect the Islamic countries far more radically than the West.
Worryingly few people in the Muslim world seem interested in the question; and it
is hence urgently necessary that we remind ourselves of the seriousness of the
situation.
For years government scientists mocked the idea of global warming. But the Rio
Earth Summit in 1992 revealed to an anxious world that the scientific facts were
now so clear as to brook no argument. The world is heating up. The industrial
gases in the atmosphere are turning our planet into a greenhouse, reflecting heat
back in rather than allowing it to be dissipated into space.
Here in England, global warming is noticed even by the ordinary citizen.

Temperature records go back over three hundred years, but the 10 hottest years
have all occurred since 1945, and three of the five hottest (1989, 1990 and 1995),
have been in the past decade. Water supply is equally erratic. January of 1997 was
the driest for 200 years. Storms at sea have become so bad that the North Sea oil
industry is now laying pipelines because the seas are too rough for tankers.
What are the exact figures? Surprisingly, they seem tiny. The rise in average
temperature between 1990 and 2050 will be 1.5 degrees Centigrade, which appears
negligible. But the temperature rise which 4000 years ago ended the last ice age
was only 2 degrees Centigrade. Research has proved that the polar ice caps are
already beginning to melt, which is why the sea level is now creeping up by five
millimetres a year. In places like the North Norfolk coast the EU is spending
millions of pounds on new concrete defences to keep the sea out. How long even
the most elaborate defences can be maintained is not clear.
However, for the West, the bad news is mixed with good. Rising temperatures
would probably be welcomed by most people. It will, in thirty years, be possible to
grow oranges in some parts of southern England. Already, the types of seeds
bought by farmers reflect the awareness that summers are warmer, and winters are
dryer. But no great catastrophe seems to threaten.
15 | P a g e
What is the situation, however, in the Muslim world? At the Rio summit, many
Islamic countries showed themselves indifferent in the issue. In fact, the countries
which campaigned most strongly against environmental controls were often
Muslim: the Gulf states, Brunei, Kazakhstan and others. The reason was that their
economies depend on oil. Cut back emissions on Western roads, or switch
electricity generating to sustainable sources like tidal or wind power, and those
countries lose out.
There is still inadequate awareness in Muslim circles of the great climatic calamity
that is looming in the next millennium. But just consider some precursors of the
catastrophe that have already come about. In the Sahel countries of Africa - Chad,
Mali and Niger, which have over 90% Muslim populations, rainfall is declining by
ten percent every decade. The huge Sahara Desert is becoming ever huger, as it
overwhelms marginal pasture and arable land on its southern fringes. The
disastrous drought which recently afflicted the Sudan ended with catastrophic
floods.
Any climatic map will show that agriculture in many Muslim countries is a
marginal business. In Algeria, a further 15% decline in rainfall will eliminate most
of the remaining farmland, sending further waves of migrants into the cities. A
similar situation prevails in Morocco, where the worst drought in living memory
ended only in 1995. The Yemen has suffered from the change in monsoon patterns
in the Indian Ocean - another consequence of global warming. In Bangladesh the
problem is not a shortage of water - it is too much of it. Floods are now normal
every three or four years, largely because of deforestation in the Himalayas which
limits soil retention of water.
Dr Norman Myers of Oxford University predicts that by 2050 'the rise in sea level
and changes in agriculture will create 150m refugees. This includes 15m from
Bangladesh, and 14m from Egypt.'
However, this figure does not include migrants generated by secondary

consequences of climatic change. These huge waves of humanity will destabilise
governments and produce wars. The modern nation-state does not facilitate
migration: Bangladeshis before 1948 could move to other parts of India, but with
Partition, they are stuck within their own borders. Epidemics, also, are likely to be
16 | P a g e
widespread. Some island nations, such as the Maldives or the Comoros, will
disappear completely beneath the waves, and their populations will have to be
accommodated elsewhere.
Again, I repeat that these forecasts are not doomsday scenarios. Those are much
worse. I merely cite the predictions of mainstream science, as set forth in European
Union and UK Department of the Environment reports. It is true that measures are
beginning to be taken to limit greenhouse gas emission. But even if no more gases
were to be released into the skies at all, temperatures would continue to rise for at
least a hundred years, because of the gases already circulating in the atmosphere.
Let me close with some reflections on the above three themes.
Are these developments on balance cause for optimism, or for disquiet? Well, we
know that the Blessed Prophet (s) liked optimism. He also taught tawakkul -
reliance upon Allah's good providence. However, he also taught that tying up our
camels is a form of relying on Allah. So how should Muslims consider their
options over the next few decades?
There are a number of issues here. Perhaps the most important is the cultivation of
an informed leadership. I mentioned earlier that most Muslim leaders cannot
provide the intellectual guidance needed to help intelligent young people deal with
the challenges of today. Ask the average Muslim activist how to prove a post-
modernist wrong, and he will not be able to help you very much. Our heads are
buried in the ground. However, it is not only intellectual trends which we ignore.
The environment, too, is an impending catastrophe which has not grabbed our
attention at all. Perhaps our activists will still be choking out their rival rhetoric on
the correct way to hold the hands during the Prayer, while they breath in the last
mouthful of oxygen available in their countries. They seem wholly oblivious to the
problem.
All this has to change. In my travels in the Islamic world, I found tremendous
enthusiasm for Islam among young people, and a no less tremendous
disappointment with the leadership. The traditional ulema have the courtesy and
moderation which we need, but lack a certain dynamism; the radical faction leaders
have fallen into the egotistic trap of exclusivism and takfir; while the mainstream
17 | P a g e
revivalist leaders, frankly, are often irrelevant. Both ponderous and slightly
insecure, trapped by an 'ideological' vision of Islam, they do not understand the
complexity of today's world - and our brighter young people see this soon
enough.
Institutions, therefore, urgently need to be established, to train young men and

women both in traditional Shari'a disciplines, and in the cultural and intellectual
language of today's world. Something like this has been done in the past: one
thinks of the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad where Ghazali taught, which
encouraged knowledge not only of fiqh, but of philosophical theology in the Greek
tradition. We need a new Ghazali today: a moderate, spiritually minded genius
who can understand secular thought and refute it, not merely rant and rave about
it.
The creation of a relevant leadership is thus the first priority. The second has to be
the evolution of styles of da'wa that can operate despite the frankly improbable task
of toppling the bunker regimes. The FIS declared war on the Algerian state, and
has achieved nothing apart from turning much of the country into a battleground.
Unless the military can be suborned, there is no chance of victory in such
situations. Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and the rest are similar cases.
An alternative da'wa strategy already exists in a sense. In many of these countries,

particularly in Egypt, the mainstream Ikhwan Muslimin operate a largescale
welfare system, which serves to remind the masses of the superior ethical status of
indigenous Islamic values. That model deserves to be expanded. But there is
another option, which does not compete with it, but augments it. That is the model
of da'wa activity to the West.
New Muslims like myself are grateful to Allah for the ni'ma of Islam - but we
cannot say that we are grateful to the Umma. Islam is in its theology and its
historical practice a missionary faith - one of the great missionary faiths, along
with Christianity and Buddhism. And yet while Christianity and Buddhism are
today brilliantly organised for conversion, Islam has no such operation, at least to
my knowledge. Ballighu anni wa-law aya ('Convey my message, even though a
single verse') is a Prophetic commandment that binds us all. It is a fard ayn, and
a fard kifaya - and we are disobeying it on both counts.
18 | P a g e
Ten years ago a book appeared in France called D'Une foi l'autre, les conversions
a l'Islam en Occident. The authors, both career journalists, carried out extensive
interviews with new Muslims in Europe and America. Their conclusions are clear.
Almost all educated converts to Islam come in through the door of Islamic
spirituality. In the middle ages, the Sufi tariqas were the only effective engine of
Islamisation in Muslim minority areas like Central Asia, India, black Africa and
Java; and that pattern is maintained today.
Why should this be the case? Well, any new Muslim can tell you the answer.
Westerners are in the first instance seeking not a moral path, or a political
ideology, or a sense of special identity - these being the three commodities on offer
among the established Islamic movements. They lack one thing, and they know it -
the spiritual life. Thus, handing the average educated Westerner a book by Sayyid
Qutb, for instance, or Mawdudi, is likely to have no effect, and may even provoke
a revulsion. But hand him or her a collection of Islamic spiritual poetry, and the
reaction will be immediately more positive. It is an extraordinary fact that the best-
selling religious poet in modern America is our very own Jalal al-Din Rumi.
Despite the immeasurably different time and place of his origin, he outsells every
Christian religious poet.
Those who puzzle over the da'wa issue in the West generally refuse to take this on
board. All too often they follow limited, ideological versions of Islam that are
relevant only to their own cultural situation, and have no relevance to the problems
of educated modern Westerners. We need to overcome this. We need to capitalise
on the modern Western love of Islamic spirituality - and also of Islamic art and
crafts. By doing so, we can reap a rich harvest, in sha' Allah. If the West is like a
fortress, then we can approach it from its strongest place, by provoking it
politically and militarily, as the absurd Saddam Hussein did; in which case we will
bring yet more humiliation and destruction upon our people. Or we can find those
areas of its defences which have become tumbledown and weak. Those are,
essentially, areas of spirituality and aesthetics. Millions of young Westerners are
dissatisfied both with the materialism of their world, and with the doctrines of
Christianity, and are seeking refuge in New Age groups and cults. Those people
should be natural recruits for Islam - and yet we ignore them.
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Similarly, and for the same constituency, we need to emphasise Islam's vibrant
theological response to the problem of conservation. The Qur'an is the richest of all
the world's scriptures in its emphasis on the beauty of nature as a theophany -
a mazhar - of the Divine names.
As a Western Muslim, who understands what moves and influences Westerners, I

feel that by stressing these two issues, Islam is well-placed not merely to flourish,
but to dominate the religious scene of the next century. Only Allah truly knows the
future. But it seems to me that we are at a crossroads, of which the millennium is a
useful, if accidental symbol. It will either be the watershed which marks the final
collapse of Islam as an intellectually and spiritually rich tradition at ease with
itself, as increasingly it presides over an overpopulated and undernourished zone of
chaos. Or it will take stock, abandon the dead end of meaningless extremism, and
begin to play its natural world role as a moral and spiritual exemplar.
As we look around ourselves today at the chaos and disintegration of the Umma,
we may ask whether such a possibility is credible. But we are living through times
when the future is genuinely negotiable in an almost unprecedented way.
Ideologies which formerly obstructed or persecuted Islam, like extreme
Christianity, nationalism and Communism, are withering. Ernest Gellner, the
Cambridge anthropologist has described Islam as 'the last religion' - the last in the
sense of truly believing its scriptural narratives to be normative.
If we have the confidence to believe that what we have inherited or chosen is

indeed absolute truth, then optimism would seem quite reasonable. And I am
optimistic. If Islam and the Muslims can keep their nerve, and not follow the
secularising course mapped out for them by their rivals, or travel the blind alley of
extremism, then they will indeed dominate the world, as once they did. And, we
may I think quite reasonably hope, they will once again affirm without the
ambiguity of worldly failure, the timeless and challenging words, wa
kalimatuLlahi hiya al-ulya - 'and the word of God is supreme'.
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Islam, Irigaray, and the retrieval of gender Sh. Abdal-Hakim Murad
Islam, Irigaray, and the retrieval of gender
Abdal-Hakim Murad
06, July, 2014
The Prophet said that women totally dominate men of intellect and possessors of
hearts. But ignorant men dominate women, for they are shackled by an animal
ferocity. They have no kindness, gentleness or love, since animality dominates their
nature. Love and kindness are human attributes; anger and sensuality belong to
the animals. She is the radiance of God, she is not your beloved. She is a creator –
you could say that she is not created.
– Jalal al-Din Rumi
The 1969 female eunuch was nothing but womb. The 1997 female eunuch has no
womb.
– Germaine Greer
Can men any longer write about women? Will our discourse always fallaciously
subjectivise the male, as the Lacanian digit to the feminine zero? Andrea Dworkin
and many others are insistent here. And yet the theologian must oppose such a
closure no less stridently. No-one should claim a monological right to instruct the
other sex concerning moral thought and conduct. Moreover, and no less seriously,
we must object to that anti-dialogical aspect of the prevailing academic feminism
which, supported by biometric footnotes, proposes that men have nothing to say
here because truly ‘female thought’ is on every level categorically different from
the thought of males. On this view, sexual difference not only creates a
predisposition to be interested in certain kinds of issues, but fundamentally affects
every way in which we handle concepts. Knowledges are sexualised, we are told;
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‘the very way in which we decide what is true and false is a function of sexual
difference.’
One reaction against this view is voiced in detail by Jean Curthoys in her new
book Feminist Amnesia. She applies a kind of Friedanite fundamentalism,
lamenting the recent decline of 60s and 70s radical feminist theory which was
grounded in assurances of identity between the sexes rather than mere equality.
Conventional academic feminism today, she avers, draws on recent biology to
posit a total epistemic discontinuity between male and female, so that all
scholarship, and all conclusions about reality, are bifurcated accordingly,
excluding all possibility of dialogue across the gender abyss. This aporetic
cessation, she insists, is intolerable.
Clearly there is force to her complaint. But equally clearly, both she and her
antagonists go too far. Biologists and philosophers now converge on a median
position which suggests that men and women do indeed think differently, but not
so differently that they can form no judgment on each other’s conclusions. It is not
just the practical implications which make this inference inescapable (could we
tolerate, for instance, separate encyclopedias for each sex?). More seriously, the
claim to aporia is to be rejected as forming part of a recent feminist turn away from
rationality itself as an oppressive product and tool of ‘male linearity’. On this view,
women’s discourse, skeptical about attempts to deduce any intrinsically true facts
about reality, is hence pre-eminently responsive to the project of postmodernism,
while men languish amid the rationalising games of late modernity. This thesis of
male backwardness is intriguing and has appealed to many; yet remains without
persuasive proof. As the Maturidis insist, rationality and morality are observed by
the mind, not merely constructed by it. Is this scruple a ‘linear male
objectification’? Surely it is just objectification: to claim that women have a
categorically more indirect, empathetic, spontaneous approach to reality may be
tantamount to affirming that they are less capable of sustained argument based on
fact. Such a conclusion is far from universal among feminists, converging as it
does with a certain masculine stereotype. Of course, it is almost certainly true, as
Professor Carol Gilligan has argued, that ethical responses differ markedly
between the sexes. For her, women ‘make moral decisions in a framework of
relationships more than in a framework of rights’. Women’s ‘moral processing is
contextually oriented’. This is uncontroversial. But value judgments amid the
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hurly-burly of lived reality are one thing; large generalizations about the nature of
the world are quite another. And in the latter field, neither revelation nor reason
persuades us that the two styles of argument, the male and female, cannot overlap.
What follows, therefore, is not an androcentric apologia, although a deliberate or

even unwilled male discourse is inescapable and is not inherently improper. It
claims to be factual, not a self-authenticating view from within a particular
‘gendered’ language-game.
A second preliminary point raises the entire problem of gendered approaches to

spirituality. The British religious philosopher John Hick, in a recent moment of
feministic reflection, proposed that ‘because of the effects upon them of patriarchal
cultures, many women have ‘weak’ egos, suffer from an ingrained inferiority
complex, and are tempted to diffusion and triviality.’ He thus suggests that women
experience greater difficulties in becoming saints because the spiritual struggle can
only be undertaken by a coherent, confident personality. On this view, women
must pass through two stages in achieving sainthood, while men require only one.
A little reflection will reveal that this position suffers from two sharp problems.
For a start, it deploys an unexamined stereotype of traditional women as shallow
and easily distracted; whereas any observation of women’s attendance at,
say, salat, or a Turkish mevlud, suggests that women’s devotional behaviour tends
to be not palpably less sober, or focused or directed than that of men. Often it is
women rather than men who retain a more serious faith under secularizing
conditions; although this may flower in the privacy of the home, rather than under
public scrutiny in the mosque. Secondly, it implies that spiritual growth is a
primarily mechanical, discursive procedure whereby the will overcomes passion,
leading to the detachment from the world which is the precondition for sainthood.
This begs some fundamental questions about the spiritual life; Hick’s image may
hold good for some forms of Christianity and Hinduism, but cannot be applied to
many other varieties of religious development, where the conscious, calculating
will is deliberately pushed into the background. Specifically, what is
characteristically male about love-based mysticism? The insistence that the mind is
a prison, and that emotion and spontaneous love of God, triggered by relatively
informal practices of the dhikr type, is a commonplace even of ‘male’ spirituality.
Here, for instance, is a poem by Rumi:
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‘In the screaming gale of Love, the intellect is a gnat.

How can intellects find space to wander there?’
And again:
‘Do not remain a man of intellect among the lovers, especially if you love that
sweet-faced Beloved.
May the men of intellect stay far from the lovers, may the smell of dung stay far
from the east wind!
If a man of intellect should enter, tell him the way is blocked, but if a lover should
come, extend him a hundred welcomes!
By the time intellect has deliberated and reflected, love has flown to the seventh
heaven.
By the time intellect has found a camel for the hajj, love has circled the Ka‘ba.
Love has come and covered my mouth.
It says: ‘Throw away your poetry, and come to the stars!”
Perhaps a modern Protestant theologian will have problems with this; but most
traditional religions assume that the way to God is through the heart, not the mind.
So Hick’s idea that ‘patriarchy’ slams the door to God in the face of traditional
women simply because they are (supposedly) less cerebral than men, seems
distinctly unpersuasive. He is simply a victim of his own cultural and
denominational limitations.
With these preliminary points in mind, let us now move on to the core issue.
Modern women writers on religion, such as Rosemary Ruether, insist that all talk
of gender in religions has to start in the beginning, with the archetypes. What do
images of God tell us about the place of men and women in the world?
In her book Sexism and God-Talk, Ruether objects to ways in which Christian
metaphors about God’s maleness are taken literally. For her, the Decalogue’s
prohibition of idolatry ‘must be extended to verbal pictures. When the word Father
is taken literally to mean that God is male and not female, represented by males
and not females, then this word becomes idolatrous.’ She acknowledges that
Christian doctrine affirms that all language about God is analogous. Nonetheless
the use of male terms for the Ultimate Reality, and the characteristically Christian
emphasis on the personhood of God, has regularly resulted in this kind of idolatry.
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Her solution is to urge the use of inclusive language, so that God is referred to
from time to time as the ‘Goddess’, or as ‘She’. Ruether even objects to the idea of
God as parent, suggesting, no doubt absurdly, that this encourages what she calls a
virtue of spiritual infantilism which makes ‘autonomy and assertion of free will a
sin.’
Despite her promethean confidence in her ability to revise tradition, Ruether has
been famously outstripped by Mary Daly, a former Catholic theologian who now,
like several influential feminists, describes herself as a ‘witch’. Her book Beyond
God the Father rejects even the metaphorical possibilities of traditional language.
To call God Father, she insists, is to call fathers God. The Trinity is thus revealed
as ‘an eternal male homosexual orgy’. As the engendering matrix of the world,
God is, in fact, paradigmatically female. And the world itself, as mirror of heaven,
‘bears fruit’, and is hence female also. The male principle is the alien force, the
nexus of disruption, aggression, and sin. Daly seems to approach the almost
dualistic notion that God is female, while the ‘horned’ devil is male. This gendered
Manicheanism may seem a bizarre inversion of Augustine’s androcentrism, but her
books are hugely influential, selling in hundreds of thousands of copies.
Not every figuring of the divine is androcentric, of course. Luce Irigaray observes
that it is in the West that ‘the gender of God, the guardian of every subject and
discourse, is always paternal and masculine’. Even Orthodoxy is more aporetic in
its metaphorical gendering of the sacred. The paintings of El Greco, as they reflect
his trajectory from the timeless icon-painting of his native Crete, through his
studies in Venice under Tintoretto, to the Toledo of the muscular Counter-
Reformation, reveal a process of increasing concretization, with growing attention
to perspective, expression, and sharpness of form. His Christ, in his late, ‘Catholic’
paintings, is more human than divine; and hence more humanly and authentically
male.
In this respect, perhaps more than in any other way, ours is not a Western tradition.
Islamic theology confronts us with the spectacular absence of a gendered Godhead.

A theology which reveals the divine through incarnation in a body also locates it in
a gender, and inescapably passes judgment on the other sex. A theology which
locates it in a book makes no judgment about gender; since books are unsexed. The
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divine remains divine, that is, genderless, even when expressed in a fully saving
way on earth.
The source of this teaching is unproblematic for believers. Secular historians might
see it differently, as confirmation that early Islam was not covenantally-defined.
Andromorphic views of the divine were necessary to Judaism, which was
communally constituted in opposition to neighboring goddess-worship, whence the
imagery of Israel as ‘God’s bride’. This continued in the Christian church, the
‘New Israel’, the ‘bride of Christ’, as the Church Fathers waged war on the
goddess cults of late antiquity, and also, increasingly, on ‘woman’ herself as the
paradigm of responsibility for the Fall. But Islam’s community of believers never
saw itself as a feminine entity, despite the interesting matronal resonances of the
term umma. The Islamic understanding of salvation history did not require that
Allah should be constructed as male.
From a theologian’s standpoint it might be said that Islam averts the difficulty
identified by Ruether through its emphasis on the divine transcendence (tanzih).
The same ‘desertlike’ abstract difference of the Muslim God which draws reproach
from Christian commentators also allows a gender-neutral image of the divine.
Allah is not neuter or androgynous, but is simply above gender. Even Judaism,
which generally has fewer problems in this area than has Christianity, does not go
this far. In the Eighteen Benedictions said by pious Jews every morning and
evening, we find the words: ‘Cause us to return, O our Father, to thy Law,’ while
in Deuteronomy 8.6, we read: ‘As a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God
disciplines you.’
Such references to God as Father are less common in the Old Testament than the
New, but they are still abundant, and are thorns in the path of gender-sensitive
liberal theologians.
When we turn to the Qur’an, we find an image of Godhead apophatically stripped

of metaphor. God is simply Allah, the God; never Father. The divine is referred to
by the masculine pronoun: Allah is He (huwa); but the grammarians and exegetes
concur that this is not even allegoric: Arabic has no neuter, and the use of the
masculine is normal in Arabic for genderless nouns. No male preponderance is
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implied, any more than feminity is implied by the grammatically female gender of
neuter plurals.
The modern Jordanian theologian Hasan al-Saqqaf emphasises the point that
Muslim theology has consistently made down the ages: God is not gendered, really
or metaphorically. The Quran continues Biblical assumptions on many levels, but
here there is a striking discontinuity. The imaging of God has been shifted into a
new and bipolar register, that of the Ninety-Nine Names.
Muslim women who have reflected on the gender issue have seized, I think with
good reason, on this striking point. For instance, one Muslim woman writer, Sartaz
Aziz, writes:
I am deeply grateful that my first ideas of God were formed by Islam because I
was able to think of the Highest Power as one completely without sex or race, and
thus completely unpatriarchal . . .
We begin with the idea of a deity who is completely above sexual identity, and thus
completely outside the value system created by patriarchy.
This passage is cited by the modern Catholic writer Maura O’Neill, who writes on
women’s issues in dialogue, and who rightly concludes: ‘Muslims do not use a
masculine God as either a conscious or unconscious tool in the construction of
gender roles.’
This does not mean that gender is absent from Muslim metaphysics.
The kalam scholars, as good transcendentalists, banished it from the non-physical
world. But the mystics, as immanentists, read it into almost everything. We might
say that while in Christianity, relationality is in the triune Godhead, and is
explicitly male, in Islam, relationality is absent from the Godhead but exuberantly
exists in the Names. To use Kant’s terms, the noumenal God is neutral, whereas
the phenomenal God is manifested in not one but two genders. The two leading
modern scholars of this tradition in Islamic thought are Izutsu and Murata, who
have both noted the parallels between Sufism’s dynamic cosmology and the Taoist
world view: each sees existence as a dynamic interplay of opposites, which
ultimately resolve to the One.
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The Sufi metaphysicians were drawing on a longstanding distinction between the

Divine Names that were called Names of Majesty (jalal), and the Names of Beauty
(jamal). The Names of Majesty included Allah as Powerful (al-Qawi),
Overwhelming (al-Jabbar), Judge (al-Hakam); and these were seen as pre-
eminently masculine. Names of Beauty included the All-Compassionate (al-
Rahman), the Mild (al-Halim), the Loving-kind (al-Wadud), and so on: seen as
archetypally feminine. The crux is that neither set could be seen as pre-eminent, for
all were equally Names of God. In fact, by far the most conspicuous of the Divine
Names in the Qur’an is al-Rahman, the All-Compassionate. And the explictly
feminine resonances of this name were remarked upon by the Prophet (s.w.s.)
himself, who taught that rahma, loving compassion, is an attribute derived from
the word rahim, meaning a womb. (Bukhari, Adab , 13) The cosmic matrix from
which differentiated being is fashioned is thus, as in all primordial systems,
explicitly feminine; although Allah ‘an sich’ remains outside qualification by
gender or by any other property.
Further confirmation for this is supplied in a famous hadith, preserved for us by al-
Bukhari, which describes how during the Muslim conquest of Mecca a woman was
running about in the hot sun, searching for her child. She found him, and clutched
him to her breast, saying, ‘My son, my son!’ The Prophet’s Companions saw this,
and wept. The Prophet was delighted to see their rahma, and said, ‘Do you wonder
at this woman’s rahma for her child? By Him in Whose hand is my soul, on the
Day of Judgement, God shall show more rahma towards His believing servant than
this woman has shown to her son.’ (Bukhari, Adab, 18)
And again: ‘On the day that He created the heavens and the earth, God created a
hundred rahmas, each of which is as great as the space which lies between heaven
and earth. And He sent one rahma down to earth, by which a mother has rahma for
her child.’ (Muslim, Tawba, 21)
Drawing on this explicit identification of rahma with the ‘maternal’ aspect of the
phenomenal divine, the developed tradition of Sufism habitually identifies God’s
entire creative aspect as ‘feminine’, and as merciful. Creation itself is the nafas al-
Rahman, the Breath of the All-Compassionate. Here the Ash‘arite occasionalism
which insists on preserving the divine omnipotence by denying secondary
causation is shifted into a mystical, matronal register, where the world of
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emanation is gendered by the sheer fact of its engendering. ‘We have created
everything in pairs,’ says the Qur’an.
This ‘female’ aspect of God allowed most of the great mystical poets to refer to
God as Layla – the celestial beloved – the Arabic name Layla actually means
‘night’. Layla is the veiled, darkly-unknown God who brings forth life, and whose
beauty once revealed dazzles the lover. In one branch of this tradition, the poets
use frankly erotic language to convey the rapture of the spiritual wayfarer as he
lifts the veil – a metaphor for distraction and sin – to be annihilated in his Beloved.
One thinks here of Christian bridal mysticism, but in reverse. St Teresa of Avila
appears to use sensual images to convey her union with Christ. But again, Christ,
as God the Son, is male. In Islamic mysticism, the divine beloved is ‘female’.
The kalam hence abolishes gender; spirituality deploys it exuberantly as metaphor,

thereby displaying an aspect of the distinction between ‘iman’ and ‘ihsan’. The
third component of the ternary laid down by the Hadith of Gabriel, ‘islam’,
comprising the outward forms of religion, also recognises and affirms gender as a
fundamental quality of existence, and this finds expression in many provisions of
Islamic law and the norms of Muslim life.
The pattern of life decreed by Islam, which is the retrieval of the Great Covenant
(mithaq), is primordial, and hence biophiliac and affirmative of the hormonal and
genetic dimensions of humanity. Body, mind and spirit are aspects of the same
created phenomenon, and are all gendered through their interrelation. To the extent
that the human creature lives in wholeness, that creature’s spiritual essence is
possessed of gender, whence the magnificent celebration of the genius of each sex
which is so characteristic of Islam. The Prophet (s.w.s.) himself can only be fully
understood in this light: his virility indicates his wholeness and hence his holiness.
His archetypal celebration of womanhood, his multiple wives, recalls the virility of
Solomon or other Hebrew patriarchs, or even of Krishna. Living life to the full, he
embraced and utterly sacralised the divinely-appointed rite of procreation.
His khasa’is, the rules which the Lawgiver fashioned for him alone, and which are
listed by Suyuti in his al-Khasa’is al-Kubra, generally imposed upon him rigours
from which his followers were exempt. The tahajjud prayer was obligatory for
him, but only optional for other Muslims. He was entitled to fast for twenty-four
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hours, or for much longer periods (the so-called Continuous Fast – sawm al-wisal);
although ordinary believers were required to fast from dawn to dusk only.
His khasa’is are for the most part austerities; and yet among them we find the
inclusion of an expansive polygamy. Several of his wives were elderly, it is true
(Sawda, Umm Habiba, Maymuna), and their marriages may have been
straightforward matters of compassion and political wisdom; but other wives were
young. By his triumphant polygamy, the Blessed Prophet was indicating the end of
the Christian war against the body, and rhetorically re-affirmed the sacramental
value of sexuality that the Hebrew prophets had proclaimed.
Inseparable from this was his valour on the field of battle. His style of spiritual
self-naughting linked to heroism has no European equivalent: it was not that of the
celibate Templars, or the Knights of Calatrava, but resonates instead with the
warrior holiness of Krishna, or the bushido of medieval Japan. The samurai ethic
combines meditative stillness, military excellence, and love for women in equal
measure; it is a spectacular expression of maleness which is illuminative of this, to
many Europeans, most remote and ungraspable dimension of the Sunna.
And this leads us towards a further question. Feminists point out that early
Christian celibacy was driven by a horror of the flesh, so that women were, in
Tertullian’s words, ‘the devil’s gateway’. This could have no deep purchase in
Islamic culture, with the hadith insisting that ‘Marriage is my Sunna, and whoever
departs from my sunna is not of me;’ a valorization of marriage which implicitly
valorized functional womanhood in a way that the Church Fathers, with their
preference for virginal perfection, had found problematic. It is true that a celibate
advocacy developed among some second and third generation Muslim ascetics
also, with Abu Sulayman al-Darani declaring, ‘Whoever marries has inclined
towards the world’. However, this kind of sentiment tended to be expressed in the
very early ascetical milieu, where the drive for celibacy, as Tor Andrae has shown,
was the result of Christian monastic influence, and was later swept away by the
tide of normative Sufism. In high medieval Islam the conjunction of holiness and
celibacy was unimaginable, and few who aspired to God were unmarried: Ibn
Taymiya was the rarest of exceptions.
This evolution of values again parallels the situation in early Christianity. A

bitterly-fought scholarly argument debates whether the appearance of the first
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Christians improved or degraded the status of women, with Peter Brown and many
feminists arguing the latter view. Ben Witherington observes that it is the later
New Testament material (Luke, Acts) that advocates an improved role for women
and a departure from the rabbinical (and hence post-prophetic) norms which
shaped the attitudes of the first Christians. However, as Jesus was a Jewish
prophet, loyal to revelation, and in particular to its interpretation within a
compassionate template, it is reasonable to assume that there existed genuinely
pro-female possibilities in the early Jesus community that capsized under the
weight of pre-existent Hellenic misogyny which some authors of the Pauline
epistles imported from the mystery religions, in the way that Foucault has shown in
the second volume of his History of Sexuality.
It may be said that an analogous corrosion befell Islamic social history. Critically,
however, this happened to a much lesser extent, for a set of reasons which demand
careful attention.
Firstly, the above-noted refusal of the scriptures to attribute male gender to the
Godhead deprived the tradition of an unarguable gynophobic foundation. The
doctrine of the Names as archetypes for all bipolarities in creation ruled out any
possibly consequent idea that humanity’s retrieval of theomorphism must entail a
shedding of gender in favour of androgyny. On the contrary, the retrieval of
theomorphism is the retrieval of gender, fully understood.
Secondly, the very word ‘woman’ had been for many Church Fathers a metonym
for concupiscence; and patristic Christianity’s consistent preference for celibacy as
a calling higher than marriage had entailed a particular attitude towards women.
The model was, of course, Christ himself, as later figured and interpreted by the
Church’s imagination. Islam, by stark contrast, maintained a version of the
primordial, and also Solomonic, polygamous, heroic model of Semitic
prophethood. As Geoffrey Parrinder has shown, sex-positive religions tend also to
accord a higher status to the female principle; and Islam from its inception stressed
that the presence of women’s bodies and spirits was in no way injurious to the
spiritual life. The Prophet (s.w.s.) worshipped in his tiny room for much of the
night, and when he was descending into prostration he would nudge aside the legs
of his young wife Aisha, to make room. A far cry from the devotions of the Syrian
monk, alone in his desert cell.
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Also built into the archetypal patterns of Islam is a characteristic emendation to

existing purity laws. Feminists have often identified these as a major sign and
strengthener of misogyny. They exist in branches of Christianity, as is shown by
Russian Orthodox hesitations about the reception of the Eucharist by menstruating
women. In Judaism they are very elaborate, so that the menstruating woman is only
sexually available for half of every month. Special bathhouses are required for her
purification.
This reflects and responds to a very ancient, and very widely-observed taboo. In
some primitive societies, women are banished from their husband’s house during
this time; the Galla tribes of Ethiopia allocate special huts for menstruating
women. Even today, the significant disruption to women’s behavioural patterns is
acknowledged in some legislation: modern French law, for instance, even classifies
extreme premenstrual tension as a form of temporary insanity.
Islam has preserved the memory of this ancient, and also Semitic hesitation, but in
an interestingly attenuated and non-judgmental form. So in sura 2 verse 220 we
read:
‘They will question you concerning the monthly course: Say, it is a hurt. So go
apart from women during the monthly course and do not approach them until they
are clean.’
What this means is clarified in the sunna. A hadith reports that:
‘A’isha was sleeping under one coverlet with God’s Messenger, when suddenly she
jumped up and left his side. The Messenger said to her, ‘What is the matter? Are
you losing blood?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ He said: ‘Wrap your waist-wrapper tightly
about you, and come back to your sleeping-place.’’
There are echoes here of this primordial human unease, but they are very reduced.
The naturalism of Islam constantly insists that holiness does not emerge from the
suppression of human instincts, but from their affirmation through regulation, so
that the natural rhythms of the body and the awe with which we regard them are
not to be ignored, but need commemoration in religious ritual. Hence a woman is
granted a suspension of formal prayer and fasting for several days in every month.
Some feminists see this as a diminution of female spirituality; Muslim female
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theologians regard it as a reverent acknowledgement; others, such as Ruqaiyyah

Maqsood interpret it as a relief from religious duties at a difficult time. The
dispensation is easily deconstructed by either suspicious or benign hermeneutics,
and resists total interpretation.
What Muslims do stress is that Islam valorises women by making the basic duties
of the faith equally incumbent upon both sexes: the suspension for a few days each
month is seen as a pragmatic and generous dispensation which does not vitiate this
basic principle. The Five Pillars are hence gender-neutral. Similarly, Islam does
not establish sacred spaces inaccessible to women. Women can and do enter the
Holy Ka‘ba. The Inner Court of the Temple in Jerusalem before its demolition by
the Romans was out of bounds to women, who faced the death penalty if they
penetrated it. Under Muslim auspices, it was thrown open to both sexes. Hence the
Dome of the Rock, the golden structure which still symbolises the Celestial City,
and which marks the terrestrial point of the Mi‘raj, is allocated on Fridays
exclusively to women, so that men pray in the nearby al-Aqsa mosque hall. Here,
as elsewhere, the sexes are segregated during congregational prayers, and the
reason given for this is again the pragmatic and unanswerable one that a
conmingling of men and women during a form of worship which entails a good
deal of physical contact would readily lead to distraction.
Women may penetrate the sacratum; but what of the ambivalent privilege of
leadership? Who is the broker of God’s saving word? If in Judaism, women could
not approach the Torah, while in Christianity they found themselves excluded from
administering the Eucharist, does the new dispensation of Islam restrain them
analogously?
Here Islam extends its feminizing of sacred spaces to its own epiphany of the
Word which resonates within them. For the Shari‘a, the word made Book is open
to female touch and cantillation. Symbolically, the custodianship of the first
Qur’anic text was entrusted to the Prophet’s wife Hafsa, not to a man.
Regarding collective celebration of the divine word, it is clear that there can be no
Islamic equivalent to the debate over women’s ordination, for the straightforward
reason that Islam does not ordain anyone, whether male or female. Our recollection
13 | P a g e
of the primordial Alast and our affirmation of the Great Covenant have already
conferred holy orders upon us all. They are valid to the extent of our recollection.
The imam does not mediate; but the spiritual director may do so, by praying for the
disciple and offering techniques of dhikr. It is a manifestation of the inescapably
anti-feminine harshness of modern pseudosalafite activism that the Sufi shaykh is
for such activists a figure not to be revered, but to be abolished. Sufism, and
several other forms of Islamic initiatic spirituality, have frequently accommodated
women in ways which purely exoteric forms of the religion have not: the Sufi
shaykh, who exercises such influence on the formation and guidance of the
disciple, and is often a more significant presence for the individual and for society
than the person of the mosque imam, may be of either gender. The modern
Lebanese saint Fatima al-Yashrutiyya is a conspicuous and deeply moving
example; but there are many others. Frequently in those Muslim societies where
the mosque has become a primarily male space, the tomb of a prophet or a saint
supplies a sacred place for women, responding to their affective spirituality which
flourishes, as Irigaray would have it, in the embrace of closed circles rather than in
straight lines. The importance of some of the tombs of the Prophets for Palestinian
women has often been noted in this regard. Pseudosalafism, with its nervousness
about any public visibility for women, seeks to suppress such contexts, with the
exception only of the tomb at Madina, which it construes not as paradigm but as
exception.
Nonetheless, the issue of a possible female imamate has been raised in several
communities in recent years, although the evidence suggests that very few women
aspire to this ambivalent position. The imam of a mosque can claim none of the
mediating authority of a priest: he does not stand in loco divinis; but is mainly
present to mark time, to ensure that the worshippers’ movements are co-ordinated,
and to represent the unity of the community. While in some cultures he may have
the added function of a pastoral counsellor, this is not a canonical requirement. All
four madhhabs of Sunni Islam affirm that the imam must be male if there are males
in the congregation. If there are only females, then many classical scholars permit
the imamship of females, and this is generally accepted nowadays. But women
cannot lead men in prayer. There are in fact no Qur’anic or Hadith texts that
explicitly lay this down: it is a product of the medieval consensus. Although those
who reject the Four Schools, and attempt to derive the shari‘a directly from the
14 | P a g e
revelation, sometimes repudiate this consensus, only a few, such as Farid Esack,
have proposed it seriously. In practice, women activists in the Muslim world
appear to have little concern for this, again, because of the absence of inherent
prestige and authority in the imamate. One can be a religious leader without being
imam of a mosque, the example of prominent theologians such as Bint al-Shati’ in
modern Egypt, and a host of medieval predecessors such as Umm Hani, A’isha al-
Ba‘uniyya, and Karima al-Marwaziyya, affording sufficient proof of this.
The discussion so far has moved downwards through districts of metaphysics to

touch on issues of shari‘a. Theologically, as we have seen, Islam tends to assert the
equality of the male and female principles, while in its practical social structures it
establishes a distinction. To understand this paradox is to understand the essence of
the Islamic philosophy of gender, which constructs roles from below, not from
above.
Women’s functions vary widely in the Muslim world and in Muslim history. In
peasant communities, women work out of doors; in the desert, and among urban
elites, womanhood is more frequently celebrated in the home. Recurrently,
however, the public space is rigorously desexualised, and this is represented by the
quasi-monastic garb of men and women, where frequently the colour white is the
colour of the male, while black, significantly the sign of interiority, of the Ka‘ba
and hence the celestial Layla, denotes femininity. In the private space of the home
these signs are cast aside, and the home becomes as colourful as the public space is
austere and polarised. Modernity, refusing to recognise gender as sacred sign, and
delighting in random erotic signalling, renders the public space ‘domestic’ by
colouring it, and makes war on all remnants of gender separation, crudely
construed as judgmental.
For Muslims, a significant development in the new feminism is the renewed desire
for apartness. Contemplating the crisis of egalitarian social contracts, where the
burden of divorce invariably bears most heavily upon women, Daly and many
others advocate an almost insurrectionist refusal of contact with the male, and the
creation of ‘women’s spaces’ as citadels for the cultivation of a true sisterhood.
This cannot be immediately useful to Muslims. Hermeneutics of suspicion directed
against either sex are irreligious from the Qur’anic perspective. God, as a sign, ‘has
created spouses for you, from your own kind, that you may find peace in them; and
15 | P a g e
He has set between you love and mercy.’ (30:21) Nonetheless, the feminist
demand for apartness should not be cast aside; it may even converge significantly
with Islam’s provision of it.
In her Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray denounces the technological workplace

created by men, which ‘brings about a sexuate levelling at a certain level, [and]
neutralizes sexual differences’. To compete, women must assume the ‘tunnel
vision’ of the achievement-oriented male, and hence relinquish aspects of their
hormonally-coded essence for the sake of a public mercantile space which is
biocidal, profiteering, anti-feminine, and now anti-gender. She also observes that
‘the sexual liberations of recent times have not established a new ethics of
sexuality’, and that women have been the prime sufferers. But an insurrectionist
feminist response ‘often destroys the possibility of constituting a shelter or a
territory of one’s own. How are we to construct this female shelter, this territory in
difference?’ The question is shared with Islam; but her response is disappointing,
and surely futile. Like Levinas, she demands a revolution in love, a ‘fertility in
social and cultural difference’ rooted in reconciliation, a new language of gesture,
and valorization of the separate nature of femaleness by males.
Given her pessimism about the mutability of the male temper, apparently
reinforced by new molecular genetic studies on gender difference, this looks like
wishful thinking, and cannot provide more than part of the agenda for an authentic
and affirming mutuality. However in her diagnosis we may locate the clue to the
more moral and more spiritual solution for which she clearly yearns. ‘Our
societies,’ she notes, ‘are built upon men-among-themselves (l’entre-hommes).
According to this order, women remain dispersed and exiled atoms.’ But there is a
rival cultural economy which cries out to be considered.
Traditionally, the Islamic public space is constructed and subjectivised primarily

by ‘l’entre-hommes’, the men in white. The women in black signal a kind of
absence even when they are present, by assuming a respected guest status. But
Islamic society, rooted in primordial and specifically Shari‘atic kinship patterns,
emphatically refuses to reduce them to the status of ‘dispersed and exiled atoms’.
There is a parallel space of the entre-femmes, a realm of alternative meaning and
fulfilment, where men are the guests, which intersects in formal ways with
the entre-hommes but which creates a sociality between women, a space for the
16 | P a g e
appreciation of nos semblables which is largely lacking amid the conditions of

modernity or postmodernity, and which is more profoundly human and feminine
than the academicised utopia of which Irigaray dreams.
Irigaray commends the new institution of affidamento, current among some Italian
feminists, which seeks a withdrawal from the irreducibly male and abrasive public
space into nuclei of relaxed female sorority. For her, this is ‘the token of another
culture which preserves for us a possible and inhabitable future, a culture whose
historical face is as yet unknown to us’. She acknowledges that the power-struggles
and generally negative experience of women’s groups suggests
that affidamento cells may not be able to merge to create a larger and stable
women’s solidarity apart from men. But the random intrusion of women into the
public space, and the consequent patterns of conflict, marginalisation, the neglect
of children, and spiralling divorce, suggest that some form of localised, informal
sorority may provide women with the matrix of identity which a fragmenting
modernity denies them.
The Islamic entre-femmes has been explored by several anthropologists. Chantal

Lobato, in her studies of Afghan refugee women, angrily rejects Western
stereotypes, praising the warmth and sisterly richness of these women’s lives. As
she records, such women’s spaces, with systems of meaning, tradition, and
narrative constructed largely by women themselves, intersect with the male
narrative through institutions such as marriage. We would add that intersection,
critically, is not determined by either sex. Irigaray holds that all discourses are
gendered; but Islam would say that this is not true: there are in fact three
discourses: male, female, and divine. Tawhid, as we have seen, refuses to gender
God or God’s word; and the Qur’anic text is hence a neutral document. It is read
by men and by women, and hence imported and internalised in gender-specific
ways. As such it supplies a barzakh between the two worlds of meaning, equally
possessed by each. It is the missing link in Irigaray’s theoretical model which
enables an authentic and stable inter-sexual sociality.
What this theology, and the anthropology which is emerging to support it, propose,
is that normative Islamic society is concurrently patriarchal and matriarchal. The
public space is primarily that of men, who may valorise it over the private; but the
latter space is valorised by women, who may regard the public space as morally
17 | P a g e
and spiritually questionable. Hence a feature of Muslim folkways is a kind of

reflexive amusement. Men frequently construct a trivialising discourse on women;
but women, as any eavesdropper on a Muslim female conversation will know,
dismiss men and their concerns with an even more amused disregard. They are
right to say, ‘Men, what do they know?’ And the male patriarchal dismissal is,
from the male viewpoint, no less correct. Aspects of the hadith discourse which
appear to diminish women can be affirmed, and also relativised, by adopting this
perspective.
A final aspect of the concurrent patriarchy and matriarchy of Muslim cultures

concerns the status of the mother. A weakness of Irigaray’s work is her worrying
indifference to the aged; like many feminists, she appears to be concerned only
with her semblables. While she accepts the reproductive and nurturing telos of the
female body, she signally fails to consider its other natural trajectory, which is
towards senescence.
The veneration of aged mothers is a recurrent feature of the Prophetic vision, in

which kindness and loyalty to the mother, a rahma to reciprocate the rahma they
themselves dispensed, is seen as an almost sacramental act. Ibn Umar narrates that
‘a man came to God’s Messenger (s.w.s.) and said: “I have committed a great sin.
Is there anything I can do to repent?” He asked, “Do you have a mother?” The man
said that he did not, and he asked again, “Then do you have a maternal aunt?” The
man replied that he did, and the Prophet (s.w.s.) told him: “Then be kind and
devoted to her”.’ (Tirmidhi) Other hadiths are legion: ‘Whoever kisses his mother
between the eyes receives a protection from the fire’ (Bayhaqi); ‘Verily God has
forbidden disobedience to your mother’ (Bukhari and Muslim).
Anthropologists working in Islamic cultures hence consistently report a dual

hierarchy which requires wives to be dutiful to husbands, while husbands must be
dutiful to mothers. Modernity loosens both these ties, the former vehemently, and
the latter absentmindedly; and the consequence has been a lopsided, frankly ageist
new hierarchy which prioritises youth over age, and imposes ruthless forms of
discrimination against those who were once considered the community’s pride and
the repository of its memory. As medical advances prolong average longevity
without substantially eroding the differential which separates male and female
mortality, modern societies relegate increasing numbers of women to involuntary
18 | P a g e
eremeticism in regimented but prayerless convents. In 1998 the Chicago Tribune

recorded that sixty percent of inhabitants of American old people’s homes never
receive a visitor. Given the gender ratio normal in such establishments, the
percentage among women must be higher still. Hence the irony that young and
middle-aged women in the West have broader horizons than hitherto (excluding,
for the moment, the religious horizon), but must all fear a decade of solitary
confinement at the end, staring into television screens, recycling memories, and
fingering months-old greetings cards from relatives who rarely if ever appear.
Even in the most Westernised of Muslim societies, the confinement of the old to
what are in effect comfortable concentration camps, is regarded with the disgust
that it merits.
Other aspects of Shari‘a discourse also call for elucidation. It cannot be our task
here to review the detailed provisions of Islamic law, and to explain, in each
individual instance, the Islamic case that gender equality, even where the concept
is meaningful, can be undermined rather than established by enforced parity of role
and rights. Such a project would require a separate volume of the type attempted
recently by Haifa Jawad; and we must content ourselves with surveying a few
representative issues.
Perhaps the most immediately conspicuous feature of Muslim communities is the

dress code traditional for women. It is often forgotten that the Shari‘a and the
Muslim sense of human dignity require a dress code for men as well: in fully
traditional Muslim societies, men always cover their hair in public, and wear long
flowing garments exposing only the hands and feet. In Muslim law, however,
their awra is more loosely defined: men have to cover themselves from the navel
to the knees as a minimum. But women, on the basis of a hadith, must cover
everything except the face, hands and feet.
Again, the feminine dress code, known as hijab, forms a largely passive text
available for a range of readings. For some Western feminist missionaries to
Muslim lands, it is a symbol of patriarchy and of woman’s demure submission. For
Muslim women, it proclaims their identity: many very secular women who
demonstrated against the Shah in the 1970s wore it for this reason, as an almost
aggressive flag of defiance. Franz Fanon reflected on a similar phenomenon among
Algerian women protesting against French rule in the 1950s. For still other women,
19 | P a g e
however, such as the Egyptian thinker Safinaz Kazim, the hijab is to be

reconstrued as a quasi-feminist statement. A woman who exposes her charms in
public is vulnerable to what might be described as ‘visual theft’, so that men
unknown to her can enjoy her visually without her consent. By covering herself,
she regains her ability to present herself as a physical being only to her family and
sorority. This view of hijab, as a kind of moral raincoat particularly useful under
the inclement climate of modernity, allows a vision of Islamic woman as liberated,
not from tradition and meaning, but from ostentation and from subjection to
random visual rape by men. The feminist objection to the patriarchal adornment or
denuding of women, namely that it reduces them to the status of vulnerable,
passive objects of the male regard, makes no headway against the hijab,
responsibly understood.
A further controversy in the Shari‘a’s nurturing of gender roles centres around the
institution of plural marriage. This clearly is a primordial institution whose
biological rationale is unanswerable: as Dawkins and others have observed, it is in
the genetic interest of males to have a maximal number of females; while the
reverse is never the case. Stephen Pinker notes somewhat obviously in his
book How the Mind Works: ‘The reproductive success of males depends on how
many females they mate with, but the reproductive success of females does not
depend on how many males they mate with.’
Islam’s naturalism, its insistence on the fitra and our authentic belongingness to the
natural order, has ensured the conservation of this creational norm within the moral
context of the Shari‘a. Polygamy, in the Islamic case, appears as a recognizably
Semitic institution, traceable back to an Old Testament tribal society frequently at
war and unequipped with a social security system that might protect and assimilate
widows into society. However it is more universal: classical Hinduism permits a
man four wives, and there are many Christian voices, not only Mormons, who are
today calling for the restoration of polygamy as part of an authentically Biblical
lifestyle. (See, for example, http://www.familyman.u-net.com/polygamy.html)
Faced with the failure of normative Western marriage and relationship codes, a
growing number of contemporary thinkers are turning to this primordial institution
for possible guidance. Phillip Kilbride, professor of anthropology at Bryn Mawr,
aroused much interest with his recent book Plural Marriage for Our Times: A
20 | P a g e
Reinvented Option. Audrey Chapman has written a more popular study

entitled Man-Sharing: Dilemma or Choice, while in 1996, the women’s rights
activist Adriana Blake published her Women Can Win the Marriage Lottery: Share
Your Man with Another Wife.
These studies, from their different perspectives, present three major ethical
arguments for polygamy. Firstly, the institution can, as its origins suggest, allow
the reintegration into a post-war society of bereaved women, of whom a tragically
large number now exist around the globe. Secondly, it can work to the advantage
of women: an extended family is created which allows one woman to go to work,
while the other cares for the children. The juggling of work and children which is a
besetting hazard of modern relationships is thus neatly averted: showing polygamy
as a frankly liberative option for women. Its advantages for children, also, have
been amply documented by the recent research of Carmon Hardy, who shows the
strong degree of family bonding and much lower incidence of crime among
offspring of Mormon polygamists at the turn of the present century. Thirdly,
polygamy is realistic; and from the Muslim perspective, we would identify this as a
principal argument given the Shari‘a’s general realism. Muslims point out that
modern Western societies are in practice far more polygamous than Muslim ones,
the difference being that in the West the second relationship exists outside any
legal framework. The present heir to the British throne, for instance, has been
polygamous, and to traditional Muslims nothing seemed more absurd than that
Diana needed to be divorced, and a constitutional crisis provoked.
True monotheism, as always, entails realism. Men are biologically designed to

desire a plurality of women, and, unless we can carry out some radical genetic
engineering work, they will always do so. And when a man has two
simultaneously, the law may either deprive one of the two women of legal rights
and social status, as in the modern West. Or it can recognise both as legitimate
spouses, as in the Shari‘a. Muslims regard as an absurdity the present arrangement
in the West where consensual relationships of all kinds are allowed and even
militantly defended: homosexual, lesbian, and so on; whereas a consensual ménage
a trois is still regarded as immoral. The last hangover of Victorian morality? In
fact, a menage a trois is perfectly acceptable in modern Western law, as long as the
parties to it live ‘in sin’ and do not attempt to marry. The absurdity of this position
requires no comment.
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There are other aspects of the Shari’a which deserve mention as illustrations of our
theme, not least those which have been largely forgotten by Muslim societies. The
intersections between the two gender universes are sometimes designed by the
Lawgiver as rights of women, and sometimes as rights of men; and the former
category is more frequently omitted from actualised Muslim communities.
Frequently the jurists’ exegesis of the texts is plurivocal. Domestic chores, for
instance, appear as an aspect of interior sociality, but this is not identified with
purely female space, since they are regarded by some madhhabs, including the
Shafi‘i, as the responsibility of the man rather than the wife. A’isha was asked,
after the Blessed Prophet’s death, what he used to do at home when he was not at
prayer; and she replied: ‘He served his family: he used to sweep the floor, and sew
clothes.’ (Bukhari, Adhan, 44.) On this basis, Shafi‘i jurists defend the woman’s
right not to perform housework. For instance, the fourteenth century Syrian jurist
Ibn al-Naqib insists: ‘A woman is not obliged to serve her husband by baking,
grinding flour, cooking, washing, or any other kind of service, because the
marriage contract entails, for her part, only that she let him enjoy her sexually, and
she is not obliged to do other than that.’
In the Hanafi madhhab, by contrast, these acts are regarded as the wife’s
obligations. Another sufficient reminder of the difficulty of generalising about
Islamic law, which remains a diverse body of rules and approaches. (Another
important area, which cannot be detailed here, is the law for custody of children:
the Hanafis prefer boys to leave the divorced mother at the age of 7, to live with
the father; girls remain with her until the menarch. For the Malikis, the boy stays
with the mother until sexual maturity (ihtilam), and the girl until her marriage is
consummated.)
Islam’s theology of gender thus contends with a maze, a web of connections which
demand familiarity with a diverse legal code, regional heterogeneity, and with the
metaphysical no less than with the physical. This complexity should warn us
against offering facile generalisations about Islam’s attitude to women. Journalists,
feminists and cultivated people generally in the West have harboured deeply
negative verdicts here. Often these verdicts are arrived at through the observation
of actual Muslim societies; and it would be both futile and immoral to suggest that
the modern Islamic world is always to be admired for its treatment of women.
Women in countries such as Saudi Arabia, where they are not even permitted to
22 | P a g e
drive cars, are objectively the victims of an oppression which is not the product of
a divinely-willed sheltering of a sex, but of ego, of the nafs of the male. In this
way, types of ‘Islamization’ being launched in several countries today by
individuals driven by resentment and committed to an anthropomorphised and
hence andromorphic God, appear to bear no relation either to
traditional fiqh discourse or to the revelatory insistence on justice. This imbalance
will continue unless actualised religion learns to reincorporate the dimension
of ihsan, which valorises the feminine principle, and also obstructs and ultimately
annihilates the ego which underpins gender chauvinism. We need to distinguish, as
many Muslim women thinkers are doing, between the expectations of the
religion’s ethos (as legible in scripture, classical exegesis, and spirituality), and the
actual asymmetric structures of post-classical Muslim societies, which, like
Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Chinese cultures, contain much that is in real need of
reform.
By now it should have become clear that we are not vaunting the revelation as
either a ‘macho’ chauvinism or as a miraculous prefigurement of late twentieth-
century feminism. Feminism, in any case, has no orthodoxy, as Fiorenza reminds
us; and certain of its forms are repellent to us, and are clearly damaging to women
and society, while others may demonstrate striking convergences with the Shari‘a
and our gendered cosmologies. We advocate a nuanced understanding which tries
to bypass the sexism-versus-feminism dialectic by proposing a theology in which
the Divine is truly gender-neutral, but gifts humanity with a legal code and family
norms which are rooted in the understanding that, as Irigaray insists, the sexes ‘are
not equal but different’, and will naturally gravitate towards divergent roles which
affirm rather than suppress their respective genius.
Biology should be destiny, but a destiny that allows for multiple possibilities.
Women’s discourse valorizes the home; but Muslim women have for long periods
of Islam’s history left their homes to become scholars. A hundred years ago the
orientalist Ignaz Goldziher showed that perhaps fifteen percent of medieval hadith
scholars were women, teaching in the mosques and universally admired for their
integrity. Colleges such as the Saqlatuniya Madrasa in Cairo were funded and
staffed entirely by women. The most recent study of Muslim female academicians,
by Ruth Roded, charts an extraordinary dilemma for the researcher:
23 | P a g e
‘If U.S. and European historians feel a need to reconstruct women’s history
because women are invisible in the traditional sources, Islamic scholars are faced
with a plethora of source material that has only begun to be studied. [ . . . ] In
reading the biographies of thousands of Muslim women scholars, one is amazed at
the evidence that contradicts the view of Muslim women as marginal, secluded,
and restricted.’
Stereotypes come under almost intolerable strain when Roded documents the fact
that the proportion of female lecturers in many classical Islamic colleges was
higher than in modern Western universities. A’isha, Mother of Believers, who
taught hadith in the ur-mosque of Islam, is as always the indispensable paradigm:
lively, intelligent, devout, and humbling to all subsequent memory.
But until past ideals are reclaimed, a polarisation in Muslim societies is likely. The
Westernised classes will reject traditional idioms simply because those styles are
not Western and fail to satisfy the élite’s self-image. The pseudosalafi literalists
will continue to reject Sufism’s high regard for women, and its demand for the
destruction of the ego. The same constituency will defy legitimate calls for a
due ijtihad-based transformation of aspects of Islamic law, not because of any
profound moral understanding of that law, but because of a hamfisted exegesis
of usul and because those calls are associated with Western influence and
demands. Whether the conscientious middle ground, inspired by the genius of
tradition, can seize the initiative, and allow an ego-free and generous Muslim
definition of the Sunna to shape the agenda in our rapidly polarising societies,
remains to be seen. No doubt, the Sufi insight that there is no justice or compassion
on earth without an emptying of the self will be the final yardstick among the wise.
But it is clear that the Islamic tradition offers the possibility of a truly radical
solution, offering not only to itself but to the West the transcendence of a debate
which continues to perplex many responsible minds, contemplating an emergent
society where the absence of roles presides over an increasingly damaging absence
of rules.
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Islamic Spirituality: the forgotten revolution
Abdal-Hakim Murad
THE POVERTY OF FANATICISM
'Blood is no argument', as Shakespeare observed. Sadly, Muslim ranks are today

swollen with those who disagree. The World Trade Centre, yesterday's symbol of
global finance, has today become a monument to the failure of global Islam to
control those who believe that the West can be bullied into changing its wayward
ways towards the East. There is no real excuse to hand. It is simply not enough to
clamour, as many have done, about 'chickens coming home to roost', and to protest
that Washington's acquiescence in Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing is the
inevitable generator of such hate. It is of course true - as Shabbir Akhtar has noted
- that powerlessness can corrupt as insistently as does power. But to comprehend is
not to sanction or even to empathize. To take innocent life to achieve a goal is the
hallmark of the most extreme secular utilitarian ethic, and stands at the opposite
pole of the absolute moral constraints required by religion.
There was a time, not long ago, when the 'ultras' were few, forming only a tiny
wart on the face of the worldwide attempt to revivify Islam. Sadly, we can no
longer enjoy the luxury of ignoring them. The extreme has broadened, and the
middle ground, giving way, is everywhere dislocated and confused. And this
enfeeblement of the middle ground, was what was enjoined by the Prophetic
example, is in turn accelerated by the opprobrium which the extremists bring not
simply upon themselves, but upon committed Muslims everywhere. For here, as
1|Page
elsewhere, the preferences of the media work firmly against us. David Koresh
could broadcast his fringe Biblical message from Ranch Apocalypse without the
image of Christianity, or even its Adventist wing, being in any way besmirched.
But when a fringe Islamic group bombs Swedish tourists in Cairo, the muck is
instantly spread over 'militant Muslims' everywhere.
If these things go on, the Islamic movement will cease to form an authentic
summons to cultural and spiritual renewal, and will exist as little more than a
splintered array of maniacal factions. The prospect of such an appalling and
humiliating end to the story of a religion which once surpassed all others in its
capacity for tolerating debate and dissent is now a real possibility. The entire
experience of Islamic work over the past fifteen years has been one of increasing
radicalization, driven by the perceived failure of the traditional Islamic institutions
and the older Muslim movements to lead the Muslim peoples into the worthy but
so far chimerical promised land of the 'Islamic State.'
If this final catastrophe is to be averted, the mainstream will have to regain the
initiative. But for this to happen, it must begin by confessing that the radical
critique of moderation has its force. The Islamic movement has so far been
remarkably unsuccessful. We must ask ourselves how it is that a man like Nasser, a
butcher, a failed soldier and a cynical demagogue, could have taken over a country
as pivotal as Egypt, despite the vacuity of his beliefs, while the Muslim
Brotherhood, with its pullulating millions of members, should have failed, and
failed continuously, for six decades. The radical accusation of a failure in
methodology cannot fail to strike home in such a context of dismal and prolonged
inadequacy.
It is in this context - startlingly, perhaps, but inescapably - that we must present our
case for the revival of the spiritual life within Islam. If it is ever to prosper, the
'Islamic revival' must be made to see that it is in crisis, and that its mental
resources are proving insufficient to meet contemporary needs. The response to
this must be grounded in an act of collective muhasaba, of self-examination, in
terms that transcend the ideologised neo-Islam of the revivalists, and return to a
more classical and indigenously Muslim dialectic.
2|Page
Symptomatic of the disease is the fact that among all the explanations offered for
the crisis of the Islamic movement, the only authentically Muslim interpretation,
namely, that God should not be lending it His support, is conspicuously absent. It
is true that we frequently hear the Quranic verse which states that "God does not
change the condition of a people until they change the condition of their own
selves."[1] But never, it seems, is this principle intelligently grasped. It is assumed
that the sacred text is here doing no more than to enjoin individual moral reform as
a precondition for collective societal success. Nothing could be more hazardous,
however, than to measure such moral reform against the yardstick of
the fiqh without giving concern to whether the virtues gained have been acquired
through conformity (a relatively simple task), or proceed spontaneously from a
genuine realignment of the soul. The verse is speaking of a spiritual change,
specifically, a transformation of the nafs of the believers - not a moral one. And as
the Blessed Prophet never tired of reminding us, there is little value in outward
conformity to the rules unless this conformity is mirrored and engendered by an
authentically righteous disposition of the heart. 'No-one shall enter the Garden by
his works,' as he expressed it. Meanwhile, the profoundly judgemental and works -
oriented tenor of modern revivalist Islam (we must shun the problematic buzz-
word 'fundamentalism'), fixated on visible manifestations of morality, has failed to
address the underlying question of what revelation is for. For it is theological
nonsense to suggest that God's final concern is with our ability to conform to a
complex set of rules. His concern is rather that we should be restored, through our
labours and His grace, to that state of purity and equilibrium with which we were
born. The rules are a vital means to that end, and are facilitated by it. But they do
not take its place.
The Holy Qur'an Sura 13:11.
To make this point, the Holy Quran deploys a striking metaphor. In Sura Ibrahim,
verses 24 to 26, we read:
Have you not seen how God coineth a likeness: a goodly word like a goodly tree,
the root whereof is set firm, its branch in the heaven? It bringeth forth its fruit at
every time, by the leave of its Lord. Thus doth God coin likenesses for men, that
3|Page
perhaps they may reflect. And the likeness of an evil word is that of an evil tree
that hath been torn up by the root from upon the earth, possessed of no stability.
According to the scholars of tafsir (exegesis), the reference here is to the 'words'
(kalima) of faith and unfaith. The former is illustrated as a natural growth, whose
florescence of moral and intellectual achievement is nourished by firm roots,
which in turn denote the basis of faith: the quality of the proofs one has received,
and the certainty and sound awareness of God which alone signify that one is
firmly grounded in the reality of existence. The fruits thus yielded - the palpable
benefits of the religious life - are permanent ('at every time'), and are not man's
own accomplishment, for they only come 'by the leave of its Lord'. Thus is the
sound life of faith. The contrast is then drawn with the only alternative: kufr, which
is not grounded in reality but in illusion, and is hence 'possessed of no
stability'.[2]
This passage, reminiscent of some of the binary categorisations of human types

presented early on in Surat al-Baqara, precisely encapsulates the relationship
between faith and works, the hierarchy which exists between them, and the
sustainable balance between nourishment and fructition, between taking and
giving, which true faith must maintain.
It is against this criterion that we must judge the quality of contemporary 'activist'
styles of faith. Is the young 'ultra', with his intense rage which can sometimes
render him liable to nervous disorders, and his fixation on a relatively narrow
range of issues and concerns, really firmly rooted, and fruitful, in the sense
described by this Quranic image?
Let me point to the answer with an example drawn from my own experience.
I used to know, quite well, a leader of the radical 'Islamic' group, the Jama'at
Islamiya, at the Egyptian university of Assiut. His name was Hamdi. He grew a
luxuriant beard, was constantly scrubbing his teeth with his miswak, and spent his
time preaching hatred of the Coptic Christians, a number of whom were actually
attacked and beaten up as a result of his khutbas. He had hundreds of followers; in
fact, Assiut today remains a citadel of hardline, Wahhabi-style activism.
4|Page
The moral of the story is that some five years after this acquaintance, providence
again brought me face to face with Shaikh Hamdi. This time, chancing to see him
on a Cairo street, I almost failed to recognise him. The beard was gone. He was in
trousers and a sweater. More astonishing still was that he was walking with a
young Western girl who turned out to be an Australian, whom, as he sheepishly
explained to me, he was intending to marry. I talked to him, and it became clear
that he was no longer even a minimally observant Muslim, no longer prayed, and
that his ambition in life was to leave Egypt, live in Australia, and make money.
What was extraordinary was that his experiences in Islamic activism had made no
impression on him - he was once again the same distracted, ordinary Egyptian
youth he had been before his conversion to 'radical Islam'.
This phenomenon, which we might label 'salafi burnout', is a recognised feature of

many modern Muslim cultures. An initial enthusiasm, gained usually in one's early
twenties, loses steam some seven to ten years later. Prison and torture - the
frequent lot of the Islamic radical - may serve to prolong commitment, but
ultimately, a majority of these neo-Muslims relapse, seemingly no better or worse
for their experience in the cult-like universe of the salafi mindset.
This ephemerality of extremist activism should be as suspicious as its content.

Authentic Muslim faith is simply not supposed to be this fragile; as the Qur'an
says, its root is meant to be 'set firm'. One has to conclude that of the two trees
depicted in the Quranic image, salafi extremism resembles the second rather than
the first. After all, the Sahaba were not known for a transient commitment: their
devotion and piety remained incomparably pure until they died.
What attracts young Muslims to this type of ephemeral but ferocious activism?
One does not have to subscribe to determinist social theories to realise the
importance of the almost universal condition of insecurity which Muslim societies
are now experiencing. The Islamic world is passing through a most devastating
period of transition. A history of economic and scientific change which in Europe
took five hundred years, is, in the Muslim world, being squeezed into a couple of
generations. For instance, only thirty-five years ago the capital of Saudi Arabia
was a cluster of mud huts, as it had been for thousands of years. Today's Riyadh is
a hi-tech megacity of glass towers, Coke machines, and gliding Cadillacs. This is
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an extreme case, but to some extent the dislocations of modernity are common to
every Muslim society, excepting, perhaps, a handful of the most remote tribal
peoples.
Such a transition period, with its centrifugal forces which allow nothing to remain
constant, makes human beings very insecure. They look around for something to
hold onto, that will give them an identity. In our case, that something is usually
Islam. And because they are being propelled into it by this psychic sense of
insecurity, rather than by the more normal processes of conversion and faith, they
lack some of the natural religious virtues, which are acquired by contact with a
continuous tradition, and can never be learnt from a book.
One easily visualises how this works. A young Arab, part of an oversized family,
competing for scarce jobs, unable to marry because he is poor, perhaps a migrant
to a rapidly expanding city, feels like a man lost in a desert without signposts. One
morning he picks up a copy of Sayyid Qutb from a newsstand, and is 'born-again'
on the spot. This is what he needed: instant certainty, a framework in which to
interpret the landscape before him, to resolve the problems and tensions of his life,
and, even more deliciously, a way of feeling superior and in control. He joins a
group, and, anxious to retain his newfound certainty, accepts the usual proposition
that all the other groups are mistaken.
This, of course, is not how Muslim religious conversion is supposed to work. It is

meant to be a process of intellectual maturation, triggered by the presence of a very
holy person or place. Tawba, in its traditional form, yields an outlook of joy,
contentment, and a deep affection for others. The modern type of tawba, however,
born of insecurity, often makes Muslims narrow, intolerant, and exclusivist. Even
more noticeably, it produces people whose faith is, despite its apparent intensity,
liable to vanish as suddenly as it came. Deprived of real nourishment, the activist's
soul can only grow hungry and emaciated, until at last it dies.
THE ACTIVISM WITHIN
How should we respond to this disorder? We must begin by remembering what

Islam is for. As we noted earlier, our din is not, ultimately, a manual of rules
6|Page
which, when meticulously followed, becomes a passport to paradise. Instead, it is a
package of social, intellectual and spiritual technology whose purpose is to cleanse
the human heart. In the Qur'an, the Lord says that on the Day of Judgement,
nothing will be of any use to us, except a sound heart (qalbun salim). [3] And in a
famous hadith, the Prophet, upon whom be blessings and peace, says that
"Verily in the body there is a piece of flesh. If it is sound, the body is all sound. If
it is corrupt, the body is all corrupt. Verily, it is the heart.
Mindful of this commandment, under which all the other commandments of Islam
are subsumed, and which alone gives them meaning, the Islamic scholars have
worked out a science, an ilm (science), of analysing the 'states' of the heart, and the
methods of bringing it into this condition of soundness. In the fullness of time, this
science acquired the name tasawwuf, in English 'Sufism' - a traditional label for
what we might nowadays more intelligibly call 'Islamic psychology.'
At this point, many hackles are raised and well-rehearsed objections voiced. It is
vital to understand that mainstream Sufism is not, and never has been, a doctrinal
system, or a school of thought - a madhhab. It is, instead, a set of insights and
practices which operate within the various Islamic madhhabs; in other words, it is
not a madhhab, it is an ilm. And like most of the other Islamic ulum, it was not
known by name, or in its later developed form, in the age of the Prophet (upon him
be blessings and peace) or his Companions. This does not make it less legitimate.
There are many Islamic sciences which only took shape many years after the
Prophetic age: usul al-fiqh, for instance, or the innumerable technical disciplines of
hadith.
Now this, of course, leads us into the often misunderstood area of sunna and bid'a,
two notions which are wielded as blunt instruments by many contemporary
activists, but which are often grossly misunderstood. The classic Orientalist thesis
is of course that Islam, as an 'arid Semitic religion', failed to incorporate
mechanisms for its own development, and that it petrified upon the death of its
founder. This, however, is a nonsense rooted in the ethnic determinism of the
nineteenth century historians who had shaped the views of the early Orientalist
synthesizers (Muir, Le Bon, Renan, Caetani). Islam, as the religion designed for
7|Page
the end of time, has in fact proved itself eminently adaptable to the rapidly
changing conditions which characterise this final and most 'entropic' stage of
history.
What is a bid'a, according to the classical definitions of Islamic law? We all know
the famous hadith:
Beware of matters newly begun, for every matter newly begun is innovation,
every innovation is misguidance, and every misguidance is in Hell. [4]
Does this mean that everything introduced into Islam that was not known to the
first generation of Muslims is to be rejected? The classical ulema do not accept
such a literalistic interpretation.
Let us take a definition from Imam al-Shafi'i, an authority universally accepted in

Sunni Islam. Imam al-Shafi'i writes:
There are two kinds of introduced matters (muhdathat). One is that which
contradicts a text of the Qur'an, or the Sunna, or a report from the early Muslims
(athar), or the consensus (ijma') of the Muslims: this is an 'innovation of
misguidance' (bid'at dalala). The second kind is that which is in itself good and
entails no contradiction of any of these authorities: this is a 'non-reprehensible
innovation' (bid'a ghayr madhmuma). [5]
This basic distinction between acceptable and unacceptable forms of bid'a is

recognised by the overwhelming majority of classical ulema. Among some, for
instance al-Izz ibn Abd al-Salam (one of the half-dozen or so great mujtahids of
Islamic history), innovations fall under the five axiological headings of the Shari'a:
the obligatory (wajib), the recommended (mandub), the permissible (mubah), the
offensive (makruh), and the forbidden (haram).[6]
Under the category of 'obligatory innovation', Ibn Abd al-Salam gives the
following examples: recording the Qur'an and the laws of Islam in writing at a time
when it was feared that they would be lost, studying Arabic grammar in order to
resolve controversies over the Qur'an, and developing philosophical theology
(kalam) to refute the claims of the Mu'tazilites.
8|Page
Category two is 'recommended innovation'. Under this heading the ulema list such
activities as building madrasas, writing books on beneficial Islamic subjects, and
in-depth studies of Arabic linguistics.
Category three is 'permissible', or 'neutral innovation', including worldly activities

such as sifting flour, and constructing houses in various styles not known in
Medina.
Category four is the 'reprehensible innovation'. This includes such misdemeanours

as overdecorating mosques or the Qur'an.
Category five is the 'forbidden innovation'. This includes unlawful taxes, giving
judgeships to those unqualified to hold them, and sectarian beliefs and practices
that explicitly contravene the known principles of the Qur'an and the Sunna.
The above classification of bid'a types is normal in classical Shari'a literature,

being accepted by the four schools of orthodox fiqh. There have been only two
significant exceptions to this understanding in the history of Islamic thought: the
Zahiri school as articulated by Ibn Hazm, and one wing of the Hanbali madhhab,
represented by Ibn Taymiya, who goes against the classical ijma' on this issue, and
claims that all forms of innovation, good or bad, are un-Islamic.
Why is it, then, that so many Muslims now believe that innovation in any form is
unacceptable in Islam? One factor has already been touched on: the mental
complexes thrown up by insecurity, which incline people to find comfort in
absolutist and literalist interpretations. Another lies in the influence of the well-
financed neo-Hanbali madhhab called Wahhabism, whose leaders are famous for
their rejection of all possibility of development.
In any case, armed with this more sophisticated and classical awareness of Islam's
ability to acknowledge and assimilate novelty, we can understand how Muslim
civilisation was able so quickly to produce novel academic disciplines to deal with
new problems as these arose.
Islamic psychology is characteristic of the new ulum which, although present in

latent and implicit form in the Quran, were first systematized in Islamic culture
9|Page
during the early Abbasid period. Given the importance that the Quran attaches to
obtaining a 'sound heart', we are not surprised to find that the influence of Islamic
psychology has been massive and all-pervasive. In the formative first four
centuries of Islam, the time when the great works of tafsir, hadith, grammar, and so
forth were laid down, the ulema also applied their minds to this problem of al-qalb
al-salim. This was first visible when, following the example of the Tabi'in, many
of the early ascetics, such as Sufyan ibn Uyayna, Sufyan al-Thawri, and Abdallah
ibn al-Mubarak, had focussed their concerns explicitly on the art of purifying the
heart. The methods they recommended were frequent fasting and night prayer,
periodic retreats, and a preoccupation with murabata: service as volunteer fighters
in the border castles of Asia Minor.
This type of pietist orientation was not in the least systematic during this period. It
was a loose category embracing all Muslims who sought salvation through the
Prophetic virtues of renunciation, sincerity, and deep devotion to the revelation.
These men and women were variously referred to as al-bakka'un: 'the weepers',
because of their fear of the Day of Judgement, or as zuhhad, ascetics, or ubbad,
'unceasing worshippers'.
By the third century, however, we start to find writings which can be understood as
belonging to a distinct devotional school. The increasing luxury and materialism of
Abbasid urban society spurred many Muslims to campaign for a restoration of the
simplicity of the Prophetic age. Purity of heart, compassion for others, and a
constant recollection of God were the defining features of this trend. We find
references to the method of muhasaba: self-examination to detect impurities of
intention. Also stressed was riyada: self-discipline.
By this time, too, the main outlines of Quranic psychology had been worked out.
The human creature, it was realised, was made up of four constituent parts: the
body (jism), the mind (aql), the spirit (ruh), and the self (nafs). The first two need
little comment. Less familiar (at least to people of a modern education) are the
third and fourth categories.
The spirit is the ruh, that underlying essence of the human individual which
survives death. It is hard to comprehend rationally, being in part of Divine
inspiration, as the Quran says:
10 | P a g e
"And they ask you about the spirit; say, the spirit is of the command of my Lord.
And you have been given of knowledge only a little."[7]
According to the early Islamic psychologists, the ruh is a non-material reality
which pervades the entire human body, but is centred on the heart, the qalb. It
represents that part of man which is not of this world, and which connects him with
his Creator, and which, if he is fortunate, enables him to see God in the next world.
When we are born, this ruh is intact and pure. As we are initiated into the
distractions of the world, however, it is covered over with the 'rust' (ran) of which
the Quran speaks. This rust is made up of two things: sin and distraction. When,
through the process of self-discipline, these are banished, so that the worshipper is
preserved from sin and is focussing entirely on the immediate presence and reality
of God, the rust is dissolved, and the ruh once again is free. The heart is sound; and
salvation, and closeness to God, are achieved.
This sounds simple enough. However, the early Muslims taught that such precious
things come only at an appropriate price. Cleaning up the Augean stables of the
heart is a most excruciating challenge. Outward conformity to the rules of religion
is simple enough; but it is only the first step. Much more demanding is the policy
known as mujahada: the daily combat against the lower self, the nafs. As the
Quran says:
'As for him that fears the standing before his Lord, and forbids his nafs its desires,
for him, Heaven shall be his place of resort.'[8]
Hence the Sufi commandment:

'Slaughter your ego with the knives of mujahada.' [9]
Once the nafs is controlled, then the heart is clear, and the virtues proceed from it
easily and naturally.
Because its objective is nothing less than salvation, this vital Islamic science has
been consistently expounded by the great scholars of classical Islam. While today
there are many Muslims, influenced by either Wahhabi or Orientalist agendas, who
believe that Sufism has always led a somewhat marginal existence in Islam, the
reality is that the overwhelming majority of the classical scholars were actively
involved in Sufism.
11 | P a g e
The early Shafi'i scholars of Khurasan: al-Hakim al-Nisaburi, Ibn Furak, al-
Qushayri and al-Bayhaqi, were all Sufis who formed links in the richest academic
tradition of Abbasid Islam, which culminated in the achievement of Imam Hujjat
al-Islam al-Ghazali. Ghazali himself, author of some three hundred books,
including the definitive rebuttals of Arab philosophy and the Ismailis, three large
textbooks of Shafi'i fiqh, the best-known tract of usul al-fiqh, two works on logic,
and several theological treatises, also left us with the classic statement of orthodox
Sufism: the Ihya Ulum al-Din, a book of which Imam Nawawi remarked:
"Were the books of Islam all to be lost, excepting only the Ihya', it would
suffice to replace them all." [10]
Imam Nawawi himself wrote two books which record his debt to Sufism, one
called the Bustan al-Arifin ('Garden of the Gnostics', and another called the al-
Maqasid(recently published in English translation, Sunna Books, Evanston Il.
trans. Nuh Ha Mim Keller).
Among the Malikis, too, Sufism was popular. Al-Sawi, al-Dardir, al-Laqqani and
Abd al-Wahhab al-Baghdadi were all exponents of Sufism. The Maliki jurist of
Cairo, Abd al-Wahhab al-Sha'rani defines Sufism as follows:
'The path of the Sufis is built on the Quran and the Sunna, and is based on living
according to the morals of the prophets and the purified ones. It may not be
blamed, unless it violates an explicit statement from the Quran, sunna, or ijma. If it
does not contravene any of these sources, then no pretext remains for condemning
it, except one's own low opinion of others, or interpreting what they do as
ostentation, which is unlawful. No-one denies the states of the Sufis except
someone ignorant of the way they are.'[11]
For Hanbali Sufism one has to look no further than the revered figures of Abdallah
Ansari, Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, Ibn al-Jawzi, and Ibn Rajab.
In fact, virtually all the great luminaries of medieval Islam: al-Suyuti, Ibn Hajar al-
Asqalani, al-Ayni, Ibn Khaldun, al-Subki, Ibn Hajar al-Haytami; tafsir writers like
Baydawi, al-Sawi, Abu'l-Su'ud, al-Baghawi, and Ibn Kathir[12] ; aqida writers
such as Taftazani, al-Nasafi, al-Razi: all wrote in support of Sufism. Many, indeed,
composed independent works of Sufi inspiration. The ulema of the great dynasties
12 | P a g e
of Islamic history, including the Ottomans and the Moghuls, were deeply infused
with the Sufi outlook, regarding it as one of the most central and indispensable of
Islamic sciences.
Further confirmation of the Islamic legitimacy of Sufism is supplied by the

enthusiasm of its exponents for carrying Islam beyond the boundaries of the
Islamic world. The Islamization process in India, Black Africa, and South-East
Asia was carried out largely at the hands of wandering Sufi teachers. Likewise, the
Islamic obligation of jihad has been borne with especial zeal by the Sufi orders. All
the great nineteenth century jihadists: Uthman dan Fodio (Hausaland), al-Sanousi
(Libya), Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri (Algeria), Imam Shamil (Daghestan) and the
leaders of the Padre Rebellion (Sumatra) were active practitioners of Sufism,
writing extensively on it while on their campaigns. Nothing is further from reality,
in fact, than the claim that Sufism represents a quietist and non-militant form of
Islam.
With all this, we confront a paradox. Why is it, if Sufism has been so respected a
part of Muslim intellectual and political life throughout our history, that there are,
nowadays, angry voices raised against it? There are two fundamental reasons
here.
Firstly, there is again the pervasive influence of Orientalist scholarship, which, at

least before 1922 when Massignon wrote his Essai sur les origines de la lexique
technique, was of the opinion that something so fertile and profound as Sufism
could never have grown from the essentially 'barren and legalistic' soil of Islam.
Orientalist works translated into Muslim languages were influential upon key
Muslim modernists - such as Muhammad Abduh in his later writings - who began
to question the centrality, or even the legitimacy, of Sufi discourse in Islam.
Secondly, there is the emergence of the Wahhabi da'wa. When Muhammad ibn
Abd al-Wahhab, some two hundred years ago, teamed up with the Saudi tribe and
attacked the neighbouring clans, he was doing so under the sign of an essentially
neo-Kharijite version of Islam. Although he invoked Ibn Taymiya, he had
reservations even about him. For Ibn Taymiya himself, although critical of the
excesses of certain Sufi groups, had been committed to a branch of mainstream
Sufism. This is clear, for instance, in Ibn Taymiya's work Sharh Futuh al-Ghayb, a
13 | P a g e
commentary on some technical points in the Revelations of the Unseen, a key work
by the sixth-century saint of Baghdad, Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani. Throughout the work
Ibn Taymiya shows himself to be a loyal disciple of al-Jilani, whom he always
refers to as shaykhuna ('our teacher'). This Qadiri affiliation is confirmed in the
later literature of the Qadiri tariqa, which records Ibn Taymiya as a key link in
the silsila, the chain of transmission of Qadiri teachings.[13]
Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, however, went far beyond this. Raised in the wastelands of
Najd in Central Arabia, he had little access to mainstream Muslim scholarship. In
fact, when his da'wa appeared and became notorious, the scholars and muftis of the
day applied to it the famous Hadith of Najd:
Ibn Umar reported the Prophet (upon whom be blessings and peace) as saying: "Oh
God, bless us in our Syria; O God, bless us in our Yemen." Those present said:
"And in our Najd, O Messenger of God!" but he said, "O God, bless us in our
Syria; O God, bless us in our Yemen." Those present said, "And in our Najd, O
Messenger of God!". Ibn Umar said that he thought that he said on the third
occasion: "Earthquakes and dissensions (fitna) are there, and there shall arise the
horn of the devil."[14]
And it is significant that almost uniquely among the lands of Islam, Najd has never
produced scholars of any repute.
The Najd-based da'wa of the Wahhabis, however, began to be heard more loudly
following the explosion of Saudi oil wealth. Many, even most, Islamic publishing
houses in Cairo and Beirut are now subsidised by Wahhabi organisations, which
prevent them from publishing traditional works on Sufism, and remove passages in
other works considered unacceptable to Wahhabist doctrine.
The neo-Kharijite nature of Wahhabism makes it intolerant of all other forms of

Islamic expression. However, because it has no coherent fiqh of its own - it rejects
the orthodox madhhabs - and has only the most basic and primitively
anthropomorphic aqida, it has a fluid, amoebalike tendency to produce divisions
and subdivisions among those who profess it. No longer are the Islamic groups
essentially united by a consistent madhhab and the Ash'ari [or Maturidi] aqida.
Instead, they are all trying to derive the shari'a and the aqida from the Quran and
14 | P a g e
the Sunna by themselves. The result is the appalling state of division and conflict
which disfigures the modern salafi condition.
At this critical moment in our history, the umma has only one realistic hope for
survival, and that is to restore the 'middle way', defined by that sophisticated
classical consensus which was worked out over painful centuries of debate and
scholarship. That consensus alone has the demonstrable ability to provide a basis
for unity. But it can only be retrieved when we improve the state of our hearts, and
fill them with the Islamic virtues of affection, respect, tolerance and reconciliation.
This inner reform, which is the traditional competence of Sufism, is a precondition
for the restoration of unity in the Islamic movement. The alternative is likely to be
continued, and agonising, failure.
NOTES
1. Sura 13:11.
2. For a further analysis of this passage, see Habib Ahmad Mashhur al-
Haddad, Key to the Garden (Quilliam Press, London 1990 CE), 78-81.
3. Sura 26:89. The archetype is Abrahamic: see Sura 37:84.
4. This hadith is in fact an instance of takhsis al-amm: a frequent procedure of usul

al-fiqh by which an apparently unqualified statement is qualified to avoid the
contradiction of another necessary principle. See Ahmad ibn Naqib al-
Misri, Reliance of the Traveller, tr. Nuh Ha Mim Keller (Abu Dhabi, 1991 CE),
907-8 for some further examples.
5. Ibn Asakir, Tabyin Kadhib al-Muftari (Damascus, 1347), 97.
6. Cited in Muhammad al-Jurdani, al-Jawahir al-lu'lu'iyya fi sharh al-Arba'in al-

Nawawiya (Damascus, 1328), 220-1.
15 | P a g e
7. 17:85.
8. 79:40.
9. al-Qushayri, al-Risala (Cairo, n.d.), I, 393.
10. al-Zabidi, Ithaf al-sada al-muttaqin (Cairo, 1311), I, 27.
11. Sha'rani, al-Tabaqat al-Kubra (Cairo, 1374), I, 4.
12. It is true that Ibn Kathir in his Bidaya is critical of some later Sufis.
Nonetheless, in his Mawlid, which he asked his pupils to recite on the occasion of
the Blessed Prophet's birthday each year, he makes his personal debt to a
conservative and sober Sufism quite clear.
13. See G. Makdisi's article 'Ibn Taymiyya: A Sufi of the Qadiriya Order' in the
American Journal of Arabic Studies, 1973.
14. Narrated by Bukhari. The translation is from J. Robson, Mishkat al-

Masabih (Lahore, 1970), II, 1380.
16 | P a g e
The Sunna as Primordiality Sh.Abdal Hakim Murad
The Sunna as Primordiality

Abdal Hakim Murad
(April 1999)
Twentieth-century Western art is not a subject for which we Muslims have

much time. The alert among us are conscious that it neatly represents the decline of
the Western Christian worldview and its replacement first with the titanic fantasies
of the Renaissance, those absurd nude figures urging us to consider the human
creature as sufficient unto himself; and then, when two world wars convinced the
Western elite that the human creature left to his own devices was unlikely to create
his own paradise on earth, the grotesqueries of the modern period. Today, one of
the best-known of British artists is Damien Hurst, famous for exhibiting a sheep
floating in formaldehyde. Hardly less famous are Gilbert and George, two middle-
aged homosexuals in grey Marks and Spencers suits, who paint vast canvases using
their own body fluids. The winner of the 1998 Turner Prize, the most prestigious
gong in the British art world, was painted with the excrement of an elephant.
Perhaps this is why we Muslims find modern Western art particularly disagreeable
and resistant to our contemplation: if art is the crystallisation of a civilisation, then
to amble along the corridors of the Tate Gallery is to be confronted with a
disturbing realisation. Christianity, when it was taken seriously by the cultural
elite, produced significant works, which Muslims can recognise as beautiful,
despite the inherent dangers of its love of the graven image. Christianity was
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sapped by the so-called enlightenment; and now that the enlightenment itself has
run its course, the Western soul, as articulated by its most intelligent and most
respected artistic representatives, has shifted its concerns to the human entrails.
From the spirit, to the mind, to the body - and now to its waste products: a
depressing trajectory, and one from which we avert our gaze. But it is immensely
instructive, nonetheless, to visit art galleries just to observe the consistency of the
decline. It serves as a reminder not only that we dislike the modern world, but also
that we don’t like disliking it. We would rather feel that there existed some
authentic connection between our worldview and that of the Western elite: but
such a link appears no longer to exist. It is not that we are extreme. It is not we
who destroyed the bridge. We are simply holding to the norms generally
recognised by our species for 99% of its history. It is the West that is extreme, that
has grown strange, that seems to have gone mad.
And yet amidst this hideous visual cacophony, occasional insights can be
observed; and these can be of an almost revelatory intensity. Almost all 20th
century Western artists have been well aware of their cultural situation, as
wreckers of a religious view of the world, and as the depictors of its chaotic,
formless, ugly successor. A few, however, have recognised the persuasiveness of
the alternatives. And a very few, those who have escaped the besetting racism and
Islamophobia of European culture, have acknowledged the beauty and depth of
Islam.
One such artist was the Russian, Kasimir Malevich. Malevich lived and worked
around the time of the Russian Revolution, a time of the concatenation of the
thousands of rival movements, religious, mystical, atheistic, or aesthetic, which
collided in the early 1920s, only for the satanic force of Josef Stalin to emerge
from the ruins. It was, for a few brief and heady seasons, a time when the dead
weight of the country’s inherited hierarchies, both religious and royal, seemed to
have been removed to make way for a vision that was not only more just, but also
more spiritually sighted.
One manifestation of this was the demand by the young artists of the Left that the
authorities abolish all representational forms of painting. Figurative art, they
rightly pointed out, is inherently oppressive. It privileges youth over age; wealth
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over poverty. In its religious modes it attributes gender and race to the divine.
Hence the revolutionary slogan:
A White Army officer

when you catch him
you beat him
and what about Raphael
it’s time to make
museum walls a target
let the mouths of big guns
shoot the old rags of the past!
The Bolsheviks themselves were horrified by this. For them, representational art
provided the foundation for all mass propaganda. And in due time, Stalin and his
successors patronised and enforced the crude style of Socialist Realism, images of
muscular peasant men and women gazing up at the new socialist dawn. The
titanism and human-worship of the Renaissance had been restored; only the desire
for greater freedom was removed.
But in the white-hot heat of the moment, when the old was crashing down with the
Winter Palace and the Kazan Cathedral, and the new, in the form of Soviet
gigantism had not yet had its triumph, a crack in European culture appeared that
for a brief but remarkable instant admitted the light of Islam.
Most of Russia, of course, is built on the ruins of Muslim civilisations. More than
any other European people, not excepting the Serbs, the Russians have seen
themselves as holy warriors against Islam. In the early 16th century, almost all of
what is today Ukraine was Muslim, ruled by the Kasimov emirs with their splendid
capital to the south of Moscow. The Crimea, one of the most densely populated
and prosperous regions on earth, was a Muslim state in alliance with the Ottoman
caliphate. The steppeland between the Black and Caspian Seas had been Muslim
for centuries, growing rich on the silk and carpet trade between Iran and Europe.
To the east of Moscow, Muslim cities adorned the banks of the Volga river,
culminating in their capital Kazan, a city perhaps twenty times the size of Moscow
itself. In 1555 Ivan the Terrible, taking advantage of divisions between these
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European Muslim empires, invaded and sacked Kazan. The great White Mosque of
Kul Sherif, with its eight minarets, was torn down, and its rubble used to build St
Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow. Although the Kazan khans had always permitted the
practice of Christianity, the Russian conquerors prohibited Islam, and forcibly
baptised the remaining population. The Cossacks were let loose on the Muslim
countryside, young men from the frozen north who captured and enslaved Muslim
women, breeding from them a new type of crusading zealot. So strong was the
sense of confrontation with the more civilised world of Islam that until the
eighteenth century it was common for drums in the Russian army to be made from
the skins of captured Muslims.
This legacy of hatred is the bedrock of Russian culture. Before Ivan the Terrible,
about half of the land-mass of Europe was Muslim. And the Russian tsars saw
themselves as the ethnic cleansers under whose hammer blows the surviving
Muslims would bow their knees at the cross.
The Russian Revolution, and the years immediately preceding and following it,
challenged every assumption of the traditional Russian mind; including the most
fundamental assumption of all: the unworthiness of Islam. Intellectuals and poets
begin to respect Muslim culture. Architects, bored and disgusted by the flamboyant
rococo splendour of St Petersburg, turned their eyes to the architecture of Muslim
Bukhara and Samarkand. Here, they thought, was a harmony of man and nature, a
celebration of beauty that was not titanic, but contemplative. The blue tiles of the
Friday Mosque and the Shah-i Zindeh tombs of Samarqand seemed not to raise up
a fist of defiance to the skies, as did the art of Europe; but to call down something
of the peace of heaven onto the earth. Russian architects such as Melnikov
incorporated Uzbek themes into their houses. A spectacular example is Melnikov’s
design for the Soviet pavilion at the 1925 International Exposition in Paris, which
borrows from the design of Central Asian Islamic tomb towers. Through works
such as these, Western architects such as Le Corbusier introduced Islamic themes
into their own design.
In the visual arts, this influence is also marked. There were other, often quite
demented movements in the air also, of course: Acmeism, Cubism,
Constructivism, and the rest. But among some artists, those with an eye still on the
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spiritual, the attractions of the Islamic sense of beauty proved too radiant to resist.
As one architect, Andrei Burov noted of his generation: ‘There was a strong
Mohammedan influence; and orthodox Mohammedanism at that.’
At this point, Kasimir Malevich steps in. Malevich was a contemplative and a
mystic, who found European representational painting to be little more than a
crude and loathsome conjuring with flabby pink limbs against heroic landscapes.
Malevich’s greatest work is a painting called Black Square. This is a square,

painted completely in black, against a white border. He called it his ‘absolute
symbol of modernity’, a modernity which he hoped would be pure and spiritual, as
opposed to the congealed decadence of 19th-century Western materialism.
He chose the image of a Black Square because it is the total inversion of the
Western tradition of recording the writhing diversity of the manifest world. He
wrote, later, that when painting it he felt ‘black nights within’, and ‘a timidity
bordering on fear’, but when he neared completion he experienced a ‘blissful
sensation of being drawn into a desert where nothing is real but feeling, and feeling
became the substance of my life.’
What on earth could this mean? The modern British writer Bruce Chatwin, who
knew Islam well, commented as follows:
‘This is not the language of a good Marxist, but of Meister Eckhart - or, for
that matter, of Mohammed. Malevich’s Black Square, his ‘absolute symbol
of modernity’, is the equivalent in painting of the black-draped Ka‘ba at
Mecca, the shrine in a valley of sterile soil where all men are equal before
God.’
Here we have the key to understanding Malevich’s achievement. In this painting,

which for Muslims must be the most significant work of 20th century art, a
cultured Russian finally breaks through the carapace of solidified reality, and
intuits the nature of truth. Simplicity is beauty. And it is depth, instilling awe, and
an authentic rather than sentimental emotion.
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Malevich, in a moment of cultural turmoil, and of intense, blazing realisation, had

stumbled upon the principle of pure beauty. Only the Real is real; manifestation
and its diversities are chimera. The line between the two is razor-sharp: Qul ja’ al-
Haqq wa-zahaqa’l-batil, inna’l-batila kana zahuqa. ‘Say: Reality has come, and
falsehood has vanished; falsehood was ever evanescent.’ This was, after all,
the aya recited by the Prophet (s) as he rode around the Ka‘ba, pointing with his
stick to each of the 360 idols in turn, upon which they fell over into the dust.
Malevich died, and Socialist Realism ruled triumphant. But for a second in
Europe’s history, the truth had been glimpsed.
At the centre of the Islamic religion lies the Ka‘ba. Uniting the aspects of the
divine beauty and the divine majesty, it is ‘a place of resort and safety for human
beings’. It lies in a city protected by the prayer of Ibrahim al-Khalil, alayhi’l-
salam: ‘My Lord, make this land a sanctuary.’
The Ka‘ba has many meanings. One of these pertains to the Black Stone, which is
the point at which the pilgrims come closest to its mystery.
‘Ali ibn Abi Talib narrated that when God took the Covenant, He recorded it
in writing and fed it to the Black Stone, and this is the meaning of the saying
of those who touch the Black Stone during the circumambulation of the
Ancient House: ‘O God! This is believing in You, fulfilling our pledge to
You, and declaring the truth of Your record.’’
The Ka‘ba therefore, while it is nothing of itself - a cube of stones and mortar -
represents and reminds its pilgrims of the primordial moment of our kind. Allah
speaks of a time before the creation of the world:
‘when your Lord brought forth from the Children of Adam, from their reins,
their seed, and made them testify of themselves, He said: ‘Am I not your
Lord?’ They said, ‘Yea! We testify!’ That was lest you should say on the Day
of Arising: ‘Of this we were unaware.’’ (7:171)
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When we visit the House, we are therefore invited to remember the Great
Covenant: that forgotten moment when we committed ourselves to our Maker,
acknowleding Him as the source of our being. The Black Stone itself is, according
to a hadith which Imam Tirmidhi declares to be sound, ‘yaqutatun min yawaqit al-
janna’ - a gemstone from Paradise itself.
The Ka‘ba functions, in the imagination of those who visit it on Hajj, or turn
towards it in Salat, as the centre and point of origin of all diverse things on earth. It
is oriented towards the four cardinal points of the compass. Its blackness recalls the
blackness of the night sky, of the heavens, and hence the pure presence of the
Creator. Allah tells us that there are signs for us in the heavens and the earth; and
recent astronomy affirms that the spiral galaxies are revolving around black holes.
A powerful symbol, written into the magnificence of space, of the spiritual vortex
which beckons us to spiral into the unknown, where quantum mechanics fail,
where time and space are no more.
The yearning for the Ka‘ba which sincere Muslims feel whenever they think of it is
therefore not, in fact, a yearning for the building. In itself it is no less part of the
created order than anything else in creation. The yearning is, instead, a fragment, a
breath of the nostalgia for our point of origin, for that glorious time out of time
when we were in our Maker’s presence.
That yearning is the central emotion of Islam. It is of the heart: the heart knows the
Ka‘ba’s splendour; the mind cannot understand it: it is, after all, only a cube 12
metres high. Hence Jalal al-Din Rumi says:
‘The intellect declares: The six directions are limits, and there is no way out.
Love says: There is a way, and I have travelled it many times.’
And later he says:
‘By the time the intellect has found a camel for the hajj, love has circled the Ka‘ba.’
This fundamental emotion of the Islamic religion, which is in fact part of the fitra -
the primordial human nature, the state of grace into which we were born - is
love, mahabba, a painful desire to return to the beloved. Wa’lladhina amanu
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ashaddu hubban li’Llah. ‘Those who have faith’, as the Qur'an insists, ‘have the
greatest love for God’. (2:165) To know one’s origin is to love it.
This nostalgic yearning to return, to circle back to the point of origin, for which the
Ka‘ba is no more than the earthly symbol and reminder, is the most common theme
in the splendid and subtle poetic tradition of Islam. Here, for instance, is a poem by
the 13th century Turkish poet and lover of Allah, Yunus Emre:
‘We need to serve a King who never may be driven from His throne
To rest within a place which we may ever feel to be our own.
A bird we need to be, to fly, to reach the very rim of things,

To drink that cordial whose joy we never may disown.
We need to be a diving bird, to plunge into the waters’ flow;

We need a gemstone to recover such as jewellers cannot know.
To enter in a garden, there to dwell in contentment’s shade;

To pass the summer as a rose - a rose whose petals never fade.
Mankind must lover be, must ever search to find the true Beloved;
Must burn within the flame of Love - nor burn in any other flame.’
Islam is hence the religion of the Alastu bi-rabbikum: ‘Am I not your Lord?’. We
follow the Great Covenant, unlike adherents of previous religions who follow
lesser, local, ethnic covenants. The Ka‘ba represents our way of centring ourselves
directly on the divine presence, the origin of all manifestation.
We need to ponder the divine wisdom in this. Islam appeared in a time and place
where there was no civilisation. If a Quraishite Arab had travelled five hundred
miles north, south, east or west, he would have found a developed culture. But
Arabia was a pocket of primordial simplicity. And Allah subhanahu wa-
ta‘ala chose this vacuum for His final message, the one that would end all previous
covenants with Him, and gather the nations of the earth to the restored Great
Covenant itself.
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One deep wisdom to be gained from this is the fact of Islam’s simplicity. Our
doctrine could not be more straightforward. The most pure, exalted,
uncompromising monotheism: the clearest idea of God there has ever been. A
system of worship that requires no paraphernalia: no crosses, confessionals, priests
or pews. Just the human creature, and its Lord. The Hajj and Umra also take us
back to an ancient time, as we wear the simplest of garments, and perform
primordial rites that reconnect us with the symbolic centre, around the purest
building there has ever been. The fast of Ramadan is also timeless: bringing us into
contact and continuity with one of the oldest of all religious devotions. In fact,
some ulema say that fasting is the oldest religious commandment of all: for in the
Garden, the grandfather and grandmother of humanity were under only one
instruction: to refrain from eating from a particular tree.
By stepping inside the protecting circle of Islam, the human creature is thus
reconnected to the ancient simplicity and dignity of the human condition. Islam
allows us to reclaim our status as khalifas: Allah’s deputies on earth.
But this is not limited to the pattern of worship alone. To worship according to one
vision of man, and to live according to another, will inevitably provoke conflict in
the soul. Some religions today allow their followers to live a fully mainstream,
20th century lifestyle outside the place of worship. But Islam knows that this is
absurd. The focussing on the divine presence during Salat relativises and
transforms our vision of everything else. When we turn away from the Ka‘ba
again, we say, to right and left, al-Salaamu alaykum. The reconnection with the
exquisite and ancient sacred centre brings a new attitude to the rest of our lives.
‘The salat bars us from corruption and ugly behaviour.’ That is, if it is done well,
with hudur - presence of mind and spirit - then the rest of our behaviour will be
refined. Poor manners, crude language, lack of compassion for others, are all sure
signs that we are offering salat incorrectly.
This means that Islam does not distinguish between our lives of worship, and
anything else in our lifestyle. And it means that the starting point for putting our
communities right, is the establishment of the prayer, which redirects us to the
point on which we are all united. Not only through public observance in the
mosque. It is possible to go through the motions of the prayer, and pay no
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attention; and this is almost worthless. The hadith says, ‘The worshipper in salat is
credited only with that of which he was conscious.’ And al-Hasan al-Basri said:
‘Every prayer in which the heart is not attentive is nearer to punishment than it is
to reward.’
A besetting problem we face, which symbolises all our other spiritual problems, is
that of the mechanical prayer: we proclaim Allahu akbar, but immediately show
that we don’t know what Allahu akbar means. We turn on a kind of autopilot,
awakening from a vague somnolence some minutes later with the salaam.
This is no good. Moving the body, and letting the tongue dance cleverly around the
palate, are of no help to us. The very word salat signifies connection. There is little
point in having a lamp if we don’t switch on the electricity: and the electricity
comes through khushu‘ - attentive humility, an awareness of the majesty and
nearness of our Lord, and all the divine beauty and rigour of which the Holy Ka‘ba
is the emblem.
The act of salat brings us home: to the earth. The name of Adam, alayhissalaam, is
said to be derived from adim - earth, dust. And Allah says that ‘He created him of
dust.’ By pressing the forehead to the ground we recall our created and fleeting
lives. ‘From it did We create you, to it do We return you, and from it shall We
bring you out one more time.’ Three encounters with the earth - and we can escape
none of them.
‘The slave is closest to his Lord while he prostrates.’ This is a hadith. We are truly
Allah’s khulafa - His deputies and representatives on this earth - when our
foreheads, the symbol of Pharaonic pride and defiance, are pressed firmly down;
when the heart is higher than the head.
No umma on the planet has a more intimate relationship with Allah’s creation than
do we Muslims. We know it as a universe of signs, which revelation teaches us to
read.
‘Truly in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the succession of
night and day are signs for people of inner understanding. Those who make
dhikr, who recall, Allah standing, and sitting, and upon their sides, and
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think about the way in which the heavens and the earth have been made.’
(3:190, 191)
Salat is a form of dhikr. Allah commands sayyidina Musa alayhisalam, ‘And

establish the Prayer for My dhikr’, My remembrance. (20:14) And remembrance of
Allah is the recollection of that original source and direction of humanity, at the
Great Covenant, and the Assembly of Am I Not your Lord - the bezm-i alast.
Hence our physical turning to the Ka‘ba, which is pure beauty, represents and
recalls our acknowledgement of our primordial home, and our affirmation, again,
of our loyalty to that promise which we all have made.
Hence the beauty, and the dignity, and the timeless poise of the Salat. By the salat,
we affirm the glory of our Lord, through tasbih and bowing and prostrating. By
the salatwe affirm the pledge which we have made to Him. And by the salat we
acknowledge that we do this only because sayyidina Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi
wa-sallam, taught us how to pray. The prayer thus becomes the culmination of the
sunna. It is the pillar of religion - whoever tears it down, has demolished the
religion. Without it our recollection of our primordial source and origin has no
meaning, and no sign.
The prayer, of course, was gifted to humanity on the Night of the Mi‘raj. This was
the culminating event of Rasulullah’s prophetic story: his greatest glory, as he rose
into the very presence of his Lord in order to behold His greatest signs.
In the divine presence, the Prophet (s.w.s.) was offered a choice. He was brought
wine, and he was brought milk. As he chooses the milk, Gabriel, upon him be
peace, says, Hudiyta li’l-fitra - ‘you have been guided to the fitra’ - the primordial,
pure, natural disposition of man.
This extraordinary event deserves careful consideration. At the summit of his

prophetic career, and hence at the summit of humanity’s history of relating to
Allah, a lesson is given about the fitra; and we are shown that this is part of, and
indeed the essence of, the Sunna.
The choice between wine and milk is the choice between corruption and purity.
Milk is described in the Qur’an as khalisan - pure. Wine, by the very process
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which produces it, is at one remove from nature. It is a natural fluid, but in a state
of corruption. It is interesting that in the modern world, consumers are very
reluctant to eat food that has rotted, but are only too happy to consume fluids that
are rotted and corrupt. And the process of fermentation is nothing other than a
process of rotting. Bottles of wine rarely advertise a sell-by date.
So: hudiyta li’l-fitra. The prophetic figure of the Mi‘raj is told by the angel that
the fitra is one of his traits. And this, by extension, becomes the nature of his
sunna, in which we must all try to partake.
The picture is a little clearer now. Rasulullah (s.w.s.) is born in Makka, a city of
ancient desert simplicity. He migrates to Madina, a city of ancient agricultural,
peasant simplicity. The rites of his religion, culminating in the salat, breathe
something of that purity and ancient humanity. They are not of our time: they make
the habits of our time seem puny and undignified.
The modern world is in a panic about its departure from nature. The seas, air and
rivers are rendered impure by industries which are the expression of human greed
and the hatred of simplicity. Alzheimer’s disease, asthma, AIDS and male
infertility are spiralling hints of the collapse of the species. The Rio conference
urged a reduction in emissions, and hence of certain forms of production, but failed
to explain how the forgotten virtue of zuhd might be made attractive again to
people whose religion has lost its appeal, and who hence worship their pleasures
and themselves. Ordinary people indicate their unease by buying organic produce,
using aloe-vera shampoo, and shunning the synthetic wherever they can. And yet
this is a return to form, not to content. It is idle to recommend a ‘natural lifestyle’ if
one adopts it only as a style rather than as a significant affirmation of a cosmos that
has a source and a destiny, and has been created to support humanity in its life of
worship and affirmation of the Real. As Muslims, we affirm a natural lifestyle: and
this is no mere pose. The retrieval of the Great Covenant demands that we live in
accordance with the created norm of our kind. Shah WaliAllah observes that God
has appointed a shari‘a for every species. And every species, when not oppressed
by modern man, remains faithful to that shari‘a. But humanity is capable of
forgetting, and of violating the message of his genes, his hormones, his gender, and
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his innate yearning for his source. This dysfunctionality is the essence of kufr, the
process by which we hide our true natures from ourselves.
The road to the reclamation of our natural norm is open only in the form of the
Sunna. Only the Muslims worship as did the founder of their religion. Prophetic
Madina was a primordial city; and by following the pattern of life exampled by its
luminous inhabitants we can genuinely retrieve our essence. The sunna is hence a
lifeboat which allows us to move safely through the toxic sea of modernity, while
sustaining ourselves from provisions which were laid down in an age before such
pollution occurred.
Let us remind ourselves of the lifestyle of the Prophet (s). We live in a time of
‘lifestyle choices’; but for us, in fact, there is only one appealing ‘lifestyle choice’.
Modernity holds up to us a range of ideal types to imitate: we can be like Peter
Tatchell, or Monica Lewinsky, or Alan Clarke, or Michael Jackson. There is a long
menu of alternatives. But when set beside the radiant humanity of Rasulullah
(s.w.s.), there is no contest at all. For the Prophet is humanity itself, in its Adamic
perfection. In him, and in his style of life, the highest possibilities of our condition
are realised and revealed. And this is beauty itself: the word jamil, beautiful, which
is one of his names, refers also to virtue. Ihsan, the Prophetic state of harmony
with God, means the engendering of husn, or beauty.
Here is a condensed recollection, a kind of verbal icon, of that Prophetic beauty. It

is paraphrased from a passage by Imam al-Ghazali, in Book 19 of his Revival of
the Religious Sciences, Ihya Ulum al-Din.
‘The Messenger of God (s) was the mildest of men, but also the bravest and most
just of men. He was the most restrained of people; never touching the hand of a
woman over whom he did not have rights, or who was not his mahram. He was the
most generous of men, so that never did a gold or silver coin spend the night in his
house. If something remained at the end of the day, because he had not found
someone to give it to, and night descended, he would go out, and not return home
until he had given it to someone in need. From what Allah gave him [...] he would
take only the simplest and easiest foods: dates and barley, giving anything else
away in the path of Allah. Never did he refuse a gift for which he was asked. He
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used to mend his own sandals, and patch his own clothes, and serve his family, and
help them to cut meat. He was the shyest of men, so that his gaze would never
remain long in the face of anyone else. He would accept the invitation of a freeman
or a slave, and accept a gift, even if it were no more than a gulp of milk, or the
thigh of a rabbit, and offer something in return. He never consumed anything given
in sadaqa. He was not too proud to reply to a slave-girl, or a pauper in rags. He
would become angered for his Lord, never for himself; he would cause truth and
justice to prevail even if this led to discomfort to himself or to his companions.
‘He used to bind a stone around his waist out of hunger. He would eat what was
brought, and would not refuse any permissible food. If there was dates without
bread, he would eat, if there was roast meat, he would eat; if there was rough
barley bread, he would eat it; if there was honey or something sweet, he would eat
it; if there was only yogurt without even bread, he would be quite satisfied with
that.
‘He was not sated, even with barley-bread, for three consecutive days, until the day
he met his Lord, not because of poverty, or avarice, but because he always
preferred others over himself.
‘He would attend weddings, and visit the sick, and attend funerals, and would often
walk among his enemies without a guard. He was the most humble of men, and the
most serene, without arrogance. He was the most eloquent of men, without ever
speaking for too long. He was the most cheerful of men. He was afraid of nothing
in the dunya. He would wear a rough Yemeni cloak, or a woolen tunic; whatever
was lawful and was to hand, that he would wear. He would ride whatever was to
hand: sometimes a horse, sometimes a camel, sometimes a mule, sometimes a
donkey. And at times he would walk barefoot, without an upper garment or a
turban or a cap. He would visit the sick even if they were in the furthest part of
Madina. He loved perfumes, and disliked foul smells.
‘He maintained affectionate and loyal ties with his relatives, but without preferring
them to anyone who was superior to them. He never snubbed anyone. He accepted
the excuse of anyone who made an excuse. He would joke, but would never say
anything that was not true. He would laugh, but not uproarously. He would watch
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permissible games and sports, and would not criticise them. He ran races with his
wives. Voices would be raised around him, and he would be patient. He kept a
sheep, from which he would draw milk for his family. He would walk among the
fields of his companions. He never despised any pauper for his poverty or illness;
neither did he hold any king in awe simply because he was a king. He would call
rich and poor to Allah, without distinction.
‘In him, Allah combined all noble traits of character; although he neither read nor
wrote, having grown up in a land of ignorance and deserts in poverty, as a
shepherd, and as an orphan with neither father nor mother. But Allah Himself
taught him all the excellent qualities of character, and praiseworthy ways, and the
stories of the early and the later prophets, and the way to salvation and triumph in
the Akhira, and to joy and detachment in the dunya, and how to hold fast to duty,
and to avoid the unnecessary. May Allah give us success in obeying him, and in
following his sunna. Amin ya rabb al-alamin.‘
This moving portrait by Imam al-Ghazali depicts our role model, and
simultaneously our ideal of humanity lived in the form of absolute beauty. His was
a life lived in fullness. There was no aspect of human perfection that he did not
know and manifest. And his perfection also indicates the nature of specifically
masculine perfection. He was a great warrior; a sound hadith narrated by Imam al-
Darimi tells us, on the authority of Ali, that
‘On the day of Badr I was present, and we sought refuge in the Prophet
(s.w.s.), who was the closest of us all to the enemy. On that day he was the
most powerful of all the combatants who fought.’
One of the Companions described him riding his horse, wearing a red turban and
holding his sword, and said later that never in his life had he seen a sight more
beautiful.
In 23 years he became undisputed ruler of Arabia. Through his genius and

charisma, and the attractive force of his personality, he united the Arabian tribes
for the first time in their history. He took his people from the depths of idolatry
into the purest form of monotheism. He gave them a law for the first time. He laid
15 | P a g e
down, in his mosque in Madina, a system of worship, self-restraint and spiritual

fruitfulness that provided the inspiration and the precedent for countless
generations of later worshippers and saints. In affirming the Ka‘ba, he affirmed
beauty; so that all else that he did was beautiful.
And in all this, he attributed his success only to Allah. He was, as Imam al-Ghazali
records, the most humble of men. He was forbearing, polite, courteous, and mild.
He paid no attention to people’s outward form, but assessed and responded to their
spirits. He forgave constantly. He was indulgent with the simple Bedouin of
Central Arabia, the roughest people on earth. When one of them. who wanted
money, pulled his cloak so violently that it left a mark, he merely smiled, and
ordered that the man be given what he wanted.
All of this came about through his detachment. The veil of self and distraction was
gone: he saw by the Truth. He knew his own prophetic status, but was not made
proud by this. He said: ‘I am the first around whom the earth shall split open at the
Resurrection - and I do not boast’. He knew his worth, but because he knew his
Lord, he was not proud.
His sunna entailed living in the world, not running away from it. After the
overwhelming experience of revelation on Mount Hira, facing the Ka‘ba, he went
down again into Meccan society. He had his solitary times with his Lord, in the
long watches of the night, forms of tahajjud so long and exacting that he forbade
his companions to imitate him. He fasted in rigourous ways that he would not
allow to others. He was detached, and yet in his world, and, in the end,
commanding his world. He was truly the khalifa: the one who has no ego, and
hence speaks, and acts, and rules, by and for Allah alone.
Living the sunna therefore means emulating his inner as well as his outer
perfection. The sunna has to come easily and naturally to us, as the normal lifestyle
of our species. ‘Not one of you has iman’, he insisted, ‘until his desire, his personal
preference, his hawa, is in accordance with what I have brought.’
Today, among our Muslim communities, there are many who have not learnt this
lesson. There are some misguided fools who imagine that one can achieve spiritual
excellence without adhering to the Sunna. This notion, that there can
16 | P a g e
be ihsan without islam, is a falsehood, repudiated by all the Muslims and the Sufis,
since the beginning of Islam. For instance, Imam Jalal al-Din Rumi says:
‘I am the servant of the Qur’an, for as long as I have a soul.

I am the dust on the road of Muhammad, the Chosen One.
If someone interprets my words in any other way,
That person I deplore, and I deplore his words.’
Conversely, we can make no claim to be following the outward sunna, unless we

have some share in emulating his inner perfection also. There are many Muslims
whose body language and manners betray their ignorance of this insight. To pray,
fast, eat halal, and observe the other aspects of the outward sunna, will produce
only a lopsided, partial type of Muslim, unless we have been working on our
inward lives. We need to watch the nafs, the ego, like a cat watching a mousehole.
We need to grind it down, so that we become like light.
The Sahaba converted millions of men and women, most of them devout
Christians, Buddhists, Jews and Zoroastrians, even without speaking to them. The
Qur’an was not translated, and few of them learnt the local languages. But the
sheer radiance of their presence, and the natural beauty of the sunna, with its
graciousness, dignity and poise, won over the hearts of those who saw them.
Today it is possible to meet Muslims who follow the outward aspects of the Sunna,
and yet do not cause hearts to incline towards them; but to be repelled. ‘Had you
been rough and hard of heart, they would have scattered from around you.’ (3:159)
We seem to have edited that verse out of the Holy Qur’an. If some of our activists,
with their flak jackets, their Doc Marten boots, and their aggressive demeanour,
could be taken back to the seventh century, it is unlikely that the Christians,
Buddhists and others would have found them very impressive. They, and the
Sahaba themselves, would have regarded them as religious failures, driven by
anger and a sense of marginalisation into a religious form marked by
aggressiveness, not the hilm, the gracious clemency which was the hallmark of the
Prophet (s.w.s.), and without which he could never have won so many hearts.
17 | P a g e
The conclusion, then, is very simple. Islam is very simple. It is the religion which
reunites us to nature and to God. It celebrates rather than represses human nature.
It discloses the splendour of our Adamic potential.
Those of us who have lived far from nature, and far from beauty, and far from the
saints, often have anger, and darkness, and confusion in our hearts. But this is not
the Sunna. The sunna is about detachment, about the confidence that however
seemingly black the situation of the world, however great the oppression, no leaf
falls without the will of Allah. Ultimately, all is well. The cosmos, and history, are
in good hands.
That was the confidence of Rasulullah (s.w.s.). It has to be our confidence as well.
There is too much depression among us, which leads either to demoralisation and
immorality, or to panic, and meaningless, ugly forms of extremism, which have
nothing to do with the serenity and beauty to which the Ka‘ba summons us. But
Islam commands wisdom, and balance. It is the middle way. And for us, whatever
our situation, it is always available, and can always be put into practice. We are the
fortunate umma in today’s world. Fortunate, because unlike Westerners, we are
still centred on beauty. In other words, we still know what we are, and what we are
called to be.
18 | P a g e
Understanding the Four Madhhabs Sh. Abdal-Hakim Murad
UNDERSTANDING THE FOUR MADHHABS

The problem with anti-Madhhabism
Sh. Abdal-Hakim Murad
[Revised edition with footnotes]
The ummah's greatest achievement over the past millennium has undoubtedly been
its internal intellectual cohesion. From the fifth century of the Hijra almost to the
present day, and despite the outward drama of the clash of dynasties, the Sunni
Muslims have maintained an almost unfailing attitude of religious respect and
brotherhood among themselves. It is a striking fact that virtually no religious wars,
riots or persecutions divided them during this extended period, so difficult in other
ways.
The history of religious movements suggests that this is an unusual outcome. The
normal sociological view, as expounded by Max Weber and his disciples, is that
religions enjoy an initial period of unity, and then descend into an increasingly
bitter factionalism led by rival hierarchies. Christianity has furnished the most
obvious example of this; but one could add many others, including secular faiths
1|Page
such as Marxism. On the face of it, Islam's ability to avoid this fate is astonishing,
and demands careful analysis.
There is, of course, a straightforwardly religious explanation. Islam is the final

religion, the last bus home, and as such has been divinely secured from the more
terminal forms of decay. It is true that what Abdul Wadod Shalabi has termed
‘spiritual entropy’[1] has been at work ever since Islam's inauguration, a fact which
is well-supported by a number of hadiths. Nonetheless, Providence has not
neglected the ummah. Earlier religions slide gently or painfully into schism and
irrelevance; but Islamic piety, while fading in quality, has been given mechanisms
which allow it to retain much of the sense of unity emphasised in its glory days.
Wherever the antics of the emirs and politicians might lead, the brotherhood of
believers, a reality in the initial career of Christianity and some other faiths,
continues, fourteen hundred years on, to be a compelling principle for most
members of the final and definitive community of revelation in Islam. The reason
is simple and unarguable: God has given us this religion as His last word, and it
must therefore endure, with its essentials of tawhid, worship and ethics intact, until
the Last Days.
Such an explanation has obvious merit. But we will still need to explain some
painful exceptions to the rule in the earliest phase of our history. The Prophet
himself (pbuh) had told his Companions, in a hadith narrated by Imam Tirmidhi,
that "Whoever among you outlives me shall see a vast dispute". The initial
schisms: the disastrous revolt against Uthman (r.a.)[2], the clash between Ali (r.a.)
and Talha, and then with Muàwiyah[3], the bloody scissions of the Kharijites[4] -
all these drove knives of discord into the Muslim body politic almost from the
outset. Only the inherent sanity and love of unity among scholars of the ummah
assisted, no doubt, by Providence overcame the early spasms of factionalism, and
created a strong and harmonious Sunnism which has, at least on the purely
religious plane, united ninety percent of the ummah for ninety percent of its
history.[5]
It will help us greatly to understand our modern, increasingly divided situation if

we look closely at those forces which divided us in the distant past. There were
many of these, some of them very eccentric; but only two took the form of mass
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popular movements, driven by religious ideology, and in active rebellion against

majoritarian faith and scholarship. For good reasons, these two acquired the names
of Kharijism and Shi'ism. Unlike Sunnism, both were highly productive of splinter
groups and sub-movements; but they nonetheless remained as recognisable
traditions of dissidence because of their ability to express the two great
divergences from mainstream opinion on the key question of the source of
religious authority in Islam.
Confronted with what they saw as moral slippage among early caliphs,
posthumous partisans of Ali (r.a.) developed a theory of religious authority which
departed from the older egalitarian assumptions by vesting it in a charismatic
succession of Imams. We need not stop here to investigate the question of whether
this idea was influenced by the Eastern Christian background of some early
converts, who had been nourished on the idea of the mystical apostolic succession
to Christ, a gift which supposedly gave the Church the unique ability to read his
mind for later generations. What needs to be appreciated is that Shi'ism, in its
myriad forms, developed as a response to a widely-sensed lack of definitive
religious authority in early Islamic society. As the age of the Righteous Caliphs
came to a close, and the Umayyad rulers departed ever more conspicuously from
the lifestyle expected of them as Commanders of the Faithful, the sharply-
divergent and still nascent schools of fiqh seemed inadequate as sources of strong
and unambiguous authority in religious matters. Hence the often irresistible
seductiveness of the idea of an infallible Imam.[6]
This interpretation of the rise of Imamism also helps to explain the second great
phase in Shi'i expansion. After the success of the fifth-century Sunni revival, when
Sunnism seemed at last to have become a fully coherent system, Shi'ism went into
a slow eclipse. Its extreme wing, as manifested in Ismailism, received a heavy
blow at the hands of Imam al-Ghazali, whose book "Scandals of the Batinites"
exposed and refuted their secret doctrines with devastating force.[7] This decline in
Shi'i fortunes was only arrested after the mid-seventh century, once the Mongol
hordes under Genghis Khan had invaded and obliterated the central lands of Islam.
The onslaught was unimaginably harsh: we are told, for instance, that out of a
hundred thousand former inhabitants of the city of Herat, only forty survivors crept
out of the smoking ruins to survey the devastation.[8] In the wake of this tidal
3|Page
wave of mayhem, newly-converted Turcoman nomads moved in, who, with the
Sunni ulama of the cities dead, and a general atmosphere of fear, turbulence, and
Messianic expectation in the air, turned readily to extremist forms of Shi'i
belief.[9] The triumph of Shi'ism in Iran, a country once loyal to Sunnism, dates
back to that painful period.[10]
The other great dissident movement in early Islam was that of the Kharijites,
literally, the seceders, so-called because they seceded from the army of the Caliph
Ali when he agreed to settle his dispute with Muawiyah through arbitration.
Calling out the Quranic slogan, "Judgement is only God's", they fought bitterly
against Ali and his army which included many of the leading Companions, until, in
the year 38, Imam Ali defeated them at the Battle of Nahrawan, where some ten
thousand of them perished.[11]
Although the first Kharijites were destroyed, Kharijism itself lived on. As it
formulated itself, it turned into the precise opposite of Shi'ism, rejecting any notion
of inherited or charismatic leadership, and stressing that leadership of the
community of believers should be decided by piety alone. This was assessed by
very rudimentary criteria: the early Kharijites were known for extreme toughness
in their devotions, and for the harsh doctrine that any Muslim who commits a
major sin is an unbeliever. This notion of takfir (declaring Muslims to be outside
Islam), permitted the Kharijite groups, camping out in remote mountain districts of
Khuzestan, to raid Muslim settlements which had accepted Umayyad authority.
Non-Kharijis were routinely slaughtered in these operations, which brought
merciless reprisals from tough Umayyad generals such as al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. But
despite the apparent hopelessness of their cause, the Kharijite attacks continued.
The Caliph Ali (r.a.) was assassinated by Ibn Muljam, a survivor of Nahrawan,
while the hadith scholar Imam al-Nasai, author of one of the most respected
collections of sunan, was likewise murdered by Kharijite fanatics in Damascus in
303/915.[12]
Like Shi'ism, Kharijism caused much instability in Iraq and Central Asia, and on
occasion elsewhere, until the fourth and fifth centuries of Islam. At that point,
something of historic moment occurred. Sunnism managed to unite itself into a
detailed system that was now so well worked-out, and so obviously the way of the
4|Page
great majority of ulama, that the attraction of the rival movements diminished
sharply.
What happened was this. Sunni Islam, occupying the middle ground between the
two extremes of egalitarian Kharijism and hierarchical Shi'ism, had long been
preoccupied with disputes over its own concept of authority. For the Sunnis,
authority was, by definition, vested in the Quran and Sunnah. But confronted with
the enormous body of hadiths, which had been scattered in various forms and
narrations throughout the length and breadth of the Islamic world following the
migrations of the Companions and Followers, the Sunnah sometimes proved
difficult to interpret. Even when the sound hadiths had been sifted out from this
great body of material, which totalled several hundred thousand hadith reports,
there were some hadiths which appeared to conflict with each other, or even with
verses of the Quran. It was obvious that simplistic approaches such as that of the
Kharijites, namely, establishing a small corpus of hadiths and deriving doctrines
and law from them directly, was not going to work. The internal contradictions
were too numerous, and the interpretations placed on them too complex, for
the qadis (judges) to be able to dish out judgements simply by opening the Quran
and hadith collections to an appropriate page.
The reasons underlying cases of apparent conflict between various revealed texts
were scrutinised closely by the early ulama, often amid sustained debate between
brilliant minds backed up with the most perfect photographic memories. Much of
the science of Islamic jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh) was developed in order to
provide consistent mechanisms for resolving such conflicts in a way which ensured
fidelity to the basic ethos of Islam. The term taarud al-adilla (mutual contradiction
of proof-texts) is familiar to all students of Islamic jurisprudence as one of the
most sensitive and complex of all Muslim legal concepts.[13] Early scholars such
as Ibn Qutayba felt obliged to devote whole books to the subject.[14]
The ulama of usul recognised as their starting assumption that conflicts between
the revealed texts were no more than conflicts of interpretation, and could not
reflect inconsistencies in the Lawgiver's message as conveyed by the Prophet
(pbuh). The message of Islam had been perfectly conveyed before his demise; and
5|Page
the function of subsequent scholars was exclusively one of interpretation, not of

amendment.
Armed with this awareness, the Islamic scholar, when examining problematic
texts, begins by attempting a series of preliminary academic tests and methods of
resolution. The system developed by the early ulama was that if two Quranic
or hadith texts appeared to contradict each other, then the scholar must first
analyse the texts linguistically, to see if the contradiction arises from an error in
interpreting the Arabic. If the contradiction cannot be resolved by this method,
then he must attempt to determine, on the basis of a range of textual, legal and
historiographic techniques, whether one of them is subject to takhsis, that is,
concerns special circumstances only, and hence forms a specific exception to the
more general principle enunciated in the other text.[15] The jurist must also assess
the textual status of the reports, recalling the principle that a Quranic verse will
overrule a hadith related by only one isnad (the type of hadith known as ahad), as
will a hadith supplied by many isnads (mutawatir or mashhur).[16] If, after
applying all these mechanisms, the jurist finds that the conflict remains, he must
then investigate the possibility that one of the texts was subject to formal
abrogation (naskh) by the other.
This principle of naskh is an example of how, when dealing with the delicate
matter of taarud al-adilla, the Sunni ulama founded their approach on textual
policies which had already been recognised many times during the lifetime of the
Prophet (pbuh). The Companions knew by ijma that over the years of the Prophets
ministry, as he taught and nurtured them, and brought them from the wildness of
paganism to the sober and compassionate path of monotheism, his teaching had
been divinely shaped to keep pace with their development. The best-known
instance of this was the progressive prohibition of wine, which had been
discouraged by an early Quranic verse, then condemned, and finally
prohibited.[17] Another example, touching an even more basic principle, was the
canonical prayer, which the early ummah had been obliged to say only twice daily,
but which, following the Miraj, was increased to five times a
day.[18] Mutah (temporary marriage) had been permitted in the early days of
Islam, but was subsequently prohibited as social conditions developed, respect for
women grew, and morals became firmer.[19] There are several other instances of
6|Page
this, most being datable to the years immediately following the Hijra, when the
circumstances of the young ummah changed in radical ways.
There are two types of naskh: explicit (sarih) or implicit (dimni).[20] The former is
easily identified, for it involves texts which themselves specify that an earlier
ruling is being changed. For instance, there is the verse in the Quran (2:142) which
commands the Muslims to turn in prayer to the Kaba rather than to
Jerusalem.[21] In the hadithliterature this is even more frequently encountered; for
example, in a hadith narrated by Imam Muslim we read: "I used to forbid you to
visit graves; but you should now visit them."[22] Commenting on this, the ulama
of hadith explain that in early Islam, when idolatrous practices were still fresh in
peoples memories, visiting graves had been forbidden because of the fear that
some new Muslims might commit shirk. As the Muslims grew stronger in their
monotheism, however, this prohibition was discarded as no longer necessary, so
that today it is a recommended practice for Muslims to go out to visit graves in
order to pray for the dead and to be reminded of the akhira.[23]
The other type of naskh is more subtle, and often taxed the brilliance of the early
ulama to the limit. It involves texts which cancel earlier ones, or modify them
substantially, but without actually stating that this has taken place. The ulama have
given many examples of this, including the two verses in Surat al-Baqarah which
give differing instructions as to the period for which widows should be maintained
out of an estate (2:240 and 234).[24] And in the hadith literature, there is the
example of the incident in which the Prophet (pbuh) once told the Companions that
when he prayed sitting because he was burdened by some illness, they should sit
behind him. This hadith is given by Imam Muslim. And yet we find
another hadith, also narrated by Muslim, which records an incident in which the
Companions prayed standing while the Prophet (pbuh) was sitting. The apparent
contradiction has been resolved by careful chronological analysis, which shows
that the latter incident took place after the former, and therefore takes precedence
over it.[25] This has duly been recorded in the fiqh of the great scholars.
The techniques of naskh identification have enabled the ulama to resolve most of
the recognised cases of taarud al-adilla. They demand a rigorous and detailed
knowledge not just of the hadith disciplines, but of history, sirah, and of the views
7|Page
held by the Companions and other scholars on the circumstances surrounding the
genesis and exegesis of the hadith in question. In some cases, hadith scholars
would travel throughout the Islamic world to locate the required information
pertinent to a single hadith.[26]
In cases where in spite of all efforts, abrogation cannot be proven, then the ulama
of the salaf recognised the need to apply further tests. Important among these is the
analysis of the matn (the transmitted text rather than the isnad of
the hadith).[27] Clear (sarih) statements are deemed to take precedence over
allusive ones (kinayah), and definite (muhkam) words take precedence over words
falling into more ambiguous categories, such as the interpreted (mufassar), the
obscure (khafi) and the problematic (mushkil).[28] It may also be necessary to look
at the position of the narrators of the conflicting hadiths, giving precedence to the
report issuing from the individual who was more directly involved. A famous
example of this is the hadith narrated by Maymunah which states that the Prophet
(pbuh) married her when not in a state of consecration (ihram) for the pilgrimage.
Because her report was that of an eyewitness, her hadith is given precedence over
the conflicting report from Ibn Abbas, related by a similarly sound isnad, which
states that the Prophet was in fact in a state of ihram at the time.[29]
There are many other rules, such as that which states that ‘prohibition takes
precedence over permissibility.’[30] Similarly, conflicting hadiths may be resolved
by utilising the fatwa of a Companion, after taking care that all the
relevant fatwa are compared and assessed.[31] Finally, recourse may be had
to qiyas (analogy).[32] An example of this is the various reports about the solar
eclipse prayer (salat al-kusuf), which specify different numbers of bowings and
prostrations. The ulama, having investigated the reports meticulously, and having
been unable to resolve the contradiction by any of the mechanisms outlined above,
have applied analogical reasoning by concluding that since the prayer in question
is still called salaat, then the usual form of salaat should be followed, namely, one
bowing and two prostrations. The other hadiths are to be abandoned.[33]
This careful articulation of the methods of resolving conflicting source-texts, so

vital to the accurate derivation of the Shariah from the revealed sources, was
primarily the work of Imam al-Shafi'i. Confronted by the confusion and
8|Page
disagreement among the jurists of his day, and determined to lay down a consistent
methodology which would enable a fiqh to be established in which the possibility
of error was excluded as far as was humanly possible, Shafi'i wrote his
brilliant Risala (Treatise on Islamic jurisprudence). His ideas were soon taken up,
in varying ways, by jurists of the other major traditions of law; and today they are
fundamental to the formal application of the Shariah.[34]
Shafi'i's system of minimising mistakes in the derivation of Islamic rulings from

the mass of evidence came to be known as usul al-fiqh (the roots of fiqh). Like
most of the other formal academic disciplines of Islam, this was not an innovation
in the negative sense, but a working-out of principles already discernible in the
time of the earliest Muslims. In time, each of the great interpretative traditions of
Sunni Islam codified its own variation on these roots, thereby yielding in some
cases divergent branches (i.e. specific rulings on practice). Although the debates
generated by these divergences could sometimes be energetic, nonetheless, they
were insignificant when compared to the great sectarian and legal disagreements
which had arisen during the first two centuries of Islam before the science of usul
al-fiqh had put a stop to such chaotic discord.
It hardly needs remarking that although the Four Imams, Abu Hanifa, Malik ibn
Anas, al-Shafi'i and Ibn Hanbal, are regarded as the founders of these four great
traditions, which, if we were asked to define them, we might sum up as
sophisticated techniques for avoiding innovation, their traditions were fully
systematised only by later generations of scholars. The Sunni ulama rapidly
recognised the brilliance of the Four Imams, and after the late third century of
Islam we find that hardly any scholars adhered to any other approach. The
great hadith specialists, including al-Bukhari and Muslim, were all loyal adherents
of one or another of the madhhabs, particularly that of Imam al-Shafi'i. But within
each madhhab, leading scholars continued to improve and refine the roots and
branches of their school. In some cases, historical conditions made this not only
possible, but necessary. For instance, scholars of the school of Imam Abu Hanifah,
which was built on the foundations of the early legal schools of Kufa and Basra,
were wary of some hadiths in circulation in Iraq because of the prevalence of
forgery engendered by the strong sectarian influences there. Later, however, once
the canonical collections of Bukhari, Muslim and others became available,
9|Page
subsequent generations of Hanafi scholars took the entire corpus of hadiths into
account in formulating and revising their madhhab. This type of process continued
for two centuries, until the Schools reached a condition of maturity in the fourth
and fifth centuries of the Hijra.[35]
It was at that time, too, that the attitude of toleration and good opinion between the
Schools became universally accepted. This was formulated by Imam al-Ghazali,
himself the author of four textbooks of Shafi'i fiqh,[36] and also of Al-Mustasfa,
widely acclaimed as the most advanced and careful of all works on usul, usul al-
fiqh fil madhhab. With his well-known concern for sincerity, and his dislike of
ostentatious scholarly rivalry, he strongly condemned what he falled ‘fanatical
attachment to a madhhab’.[37]While it was necessary for the Muslim to follow a
recognised madhhab in order to avert the lethal danger of misinterpreting the
sources, he must never fall into the trap of considering his own school
categorically superior to the others. With a few insignificant exceptions in the late
Ottoman period, the great scholars of Sunni Islam have followed the ethos outlined
by Imam al-Ghazali, and have been conspicuously respectful of each others
madhhab. Anyone who has studied under traditional ulama will be well-aware of
this fact.[38]
The evolution of the Four Schools did not stifle, as some Orientalists have
suggested,[39] the capacity for the refinement or extension of positive law.[40] On
the contrary, sophisticated mechanisms were available which not only permitted
qualified individuals to derive the Shariah from the Quran and Sunnah on their
own authority, but actually obliged them to do this. According to most scholars, an
expert who has fully mastered the sources and fulfilled a variety of necessary
scholarly conditions is not permitted to follow the prevalent rulings of his School,
but must derive the rulings himself from the revealed sources. Such an individual
is known as a mujtahid,[41] a term derived from the famous hadith of Muadh ibn
Jabal.[42]
Few would seriously deny that for a Muslim to venture beyond established expert
opinion and have recourse directly to the Quran and Sunnah, he must be a scholar
of great eminence. The danger of less-qualified individuals misunderstanding the
sources and hence damaging the Shariah is a very real one, as was shown by the
10 | P a g e
discord and strife which afflicted some early Muslims, and even some of the
Companions themselves, in the period which preceded the establishment of the
Orthodox Schools. Prior to Islam, entire religions had been subverted by
inadequate scriptural scholarship, and it was vital that Islam should be secured
from a comparable fate.
In order to protect the Shariah from the danger of innovation and distortion, the
great scholars of usul laid down rigorous conditions which must be fulfilled by
anyone wishing to claim the right of ijtihad for himself.[43] These conditions
include:
(a) mastery of the Arabic language, to minimise the possibility of misinterpreting

Revelation on purely linguistic grounds;
(b) a profound knowledge of the Quran and Sunnah and the circumstances
surrounding the revelation of each verse and hadith, together with a full knowledge
of the Quranic and hadith commentaries, and a control of all the interpretative
techniques discussed above;
(c) knowledge of the specialised disciplines of hadith, such as the assessment of

narrators and of the matn [text];
(d) knowledge of the views of the Companions, Followers and the great imams,
and of the positions and reasoning expounded in the textbooks of fiqh, combined
with the knowledge of cases where a consensus (ijma) has been reached;
(e) knowledge of the science of juridical analogy (qiyas), its types and conditions;
(f) knowledge of ones own society and of public interest (maslahah);
(g) knowing the general objectives (maqasid) of the Shariah;
(h) a high degree of intelligence and personal piety, combined with the Islamic
virtues of compassion, courtesy, and modesty.
A scholar who has fulfilled these conditions can be considered a mujtahid fil-shar,
and is not obliged, or even permitted, to follow an existing authoritative
11 | P a g e
madhhab.[44]This is what some of the Imams were saying when they forbade their
great disciples from imitating them uncritically. But for the much greater number
of scholars whose expertise has not reached such dizzying heights, it may be
possible to become a mujtahid fi’l-madhhab, that is, a scholar who remains broadly
convinced of the doctrines of his school, but is qualified to differ from received
opinion within it.[45] There have been a number of examples of such men, for
instance Imam al-Nawawi among the Shafi'is, Qadi Ibn Abd al-Barr among the
Malikis, Ibn Abidin among the Hanafis, and Ibn Qudama among the Hanbalis. All
of these scholars considered themselves followers of the fundamental interpretative
principles of their own madhhabs, but are on record as having exercised their own
gifts of scholarship and judgement in reaching many new verdicts within
them.[46] It is to these experts that the Mujtahid Imams directed their advice
concerning ijtihad, such as Imam al-Shafi'i's instruction that ‘if you find
a hadith that contradicts my verdict, then follow the hadith’.[47] It is obvious that
whatever some writers nowadays like to believe, such counsels were never
intended for use by the Islamically-uneducated masses. Imam al-Shafiì was not
addressing a crowd of butchers, nightwatchman and donkey-drovers.
Other categories of mujtahids are listed by the usul scholars; but the distinctions
between them are subtle and not relevant to our theme.[48] The remaining
categories can in practice be reduced to two: the muttabi (follower), who follows
his madhhab while being aware of the Quranic and hadith texts and the reasoning,
underlying its positions,[49] and secondly the muqallid (emulator), who simply
conforms to the madhhab because of his confidence in its scholars, and without
necessarily knowing the detailed reasoning behind all its thousands of rulings.[50]
Clearly it is recommended for the muqallid to learn as much as he or she is able of

the formal proofs of the madhhab. But it is equally clear that not every Muslim can
be a scholar. Scholarship takes a lot of time, and for the ummah to function
properly most people must have other employment: as accountants, soldiers,
butchers, and so forth.[51] As such, they cannot reasonably be expected to become
great ulama as well, even if we suppose that all of them have the requisite
intelligence. The Holy Quran itself states that less well-informed believers should
have recourse to qualified experts: So ask the people of remembrance, if you do not
know (16:43).[52] (According to the tafsir experts, the people of remembrance are
12 | P a g e
the ulama.) And in another verse, the Muslims are enjoined to create and maintain
a group of specialists who provide authoritative guidance for non-specialists: A
band from each community should stay behind to gain instruction in religion and
to warn the people when they return to them, so that they may take heed (9:122).
Given the depth of scholarship needed to understand the revealed texts accurately,
and the extreme warnings we have been given against distorting the Revelation, it
is obvious that ordinary Muslims are duty bound to follow expert opinion, rather
than rely on their own reasoning and limited knowledge. This obvious duty was
well-known to the early Muslims: the Caliph Umar (r.a.) followed certain rulings
of Abu Bakr (r.a.), saying I would be ashamed before God to differ from the view
of Abu Bakr. And Ibn Masud (r.a.), in turn, despite being a mujtahid in the fullest
sense, used in certain issues to follow Umar (r.a.). According to al-Shabi: Six of
the Companions of the Prophet (pbuh) used to give fatwas to the people: Ibn
Masud, Umar ibn al-Khattab, Ali, Zayd ibn Thabit, Ubayy ibn Kab, and Abu Musa
(al-Ashari). And out of these, three would abandon their own judgements in favour
of the judgements of three others: Abdallah (ibn Masud) would abandon his own
judgement for the judgement of Umar, Abu Musa would abandon his own
judgement for the judgement of Ali, and Zayd would abandon his own judgement
for the judgement of Ubayy ibn Kab.[53]
This verdict, namely that one is well-advised to follow a great Imam as ones guide
to the Sunnah, rather than relying on oneself, is particularly binding upon Muslims
in countries such as Britain, among whom only a small percentage is even entitled
to have a choice in this matter. This is for the simple reason that unless one knows
Arabic,[54] then even if one wishes to read all the hadith determining a particular
issue, one cannot. For various reasons, including their great length, no more than
ten of the basic hadith collections have been translated into English. There remain
well over three hundred others, including such seminal works as the Musnad of
Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal,[55] the Musannaf of Ibn Abi Shayba,[56] the Sahih of
Ibn Khuzayma,[57] the Mustadrak of al-Hakim,[58] and many other multi-volume
collections, which contain large numbers of sound hadiths which cannot be found
in Bukhari, Muslim, and the other works that have so far been translated. Even if
we assume that the existing translations are entirely accurate, it is obvious that a
policy of trying to derive the Shariah directly from the Book and the Sunnah
cannot be attempted by those who have no access to the Arabic. To attempt to
13 | P a g e
discern the Shariah merely on the basis of the hadiths which have been translated
will be to ignore and amputate much of the Sunnah, hence leading to serious
distortions.[59]
Let me give just two examples of this. The Sunni Madhhabs, in their rules for the
conduct of legal cases, lay down the principle that the canonical punishments
(hudud) should not be applied in cases where there is the least ambiguity, and that
the qadi should actively strive to prove that such ambiguities exist. An amateur
reading in the Sound Six collections will find no confirmation of this.[60] But the
madhhab ruling is based on a hadith narrated by a sound chain, and recorded in
theMusannaf of Ibn Abi Shayba, the Musnad of al-Harithi, and the Musnad of
Musaddad ibn Musarhad. The text is: "Ward off the hudud by means of
ambiguities."[61] Imam al-Sanani, in his book Al-Ansab, narrates the
circumstances of this hadith: "A man was found drunk, and was brought to Umar,
who ordered the hadd of eighty lashes to be applied. When this had been done, the
man said: Umar, you have wronged me! I am a slave! (Slaves receive only half the
punishment.) Umar was grief-stricken at this, and recited the Prophetic hadith,
Ward off the hudud by means of ambiguities."[62]
Another example is provided by the practice of istighfar for others during the Hajj.
According to a hadith, ‘Forgiveness is granted to the Hajji, and to those for whom
the Hajji prays.’ This hadith is not related in any of the collections so far translated
into English; but it is narrated, by a sound isnad, in many other collections,
including al-Mu`jam al-Saghir of al-Tabarani and the Musnad of al-Bazzar.[63]
Another example pertains to the important practice, recognised by the madhhabs,

of performing sunnah prayers as soon as possible after the end of the Maghrib
obligatory prayer. The hadith runs: Make haste to perform the two rakas after the
Maghrib, for they are raised up (to Heaven) alongside the obligatory prayer.
The hadith is narrated by Imam Razin in his Jami.
Because of the traditional pious fear of distorting the Law of Islam, the
overwhelming majority of the great scholars of the past - certainly well over
ninety-nine percent of them - have adhered loyally to a madhhab.[64] It is true that
in the troubled fourteenth century a handful of dissenters appeared, such as Ibn
Taymiyyah and Ibn al-Qayyim;[65] but even these individuals never recommended
14 | P a g e
that semi-educated Muslims should attempt ijtihad without expert help. And in any
case, although these authors have recently been resurrected and made prominent,
their influence on the orthodox scholarship of classical Islam was negligible, as is
suggested by the small number of manuscripts of their works preserved in the great
libraries of the Islamic world.[66]
Nonetheless, social turbulences have in the past century thrown up a number of

writers who have advocated the abandonment of authoritative scholarship. The
most prominent figures in this campaign were Muhammad Abduh and his pupil
Muhammad Rashid Rida.[67] Dazzled by the triumph of the West, and informed in
subtle ways by their own well-documented commitment to Freemasonry, these
men urged Muslims to throw off the shackles of taqlid, and to reject the authority
of the Four Schools. Today in some Arab capitals, especially where the indigenous
tradition of orthodox scholarship has been weakened, it is common to see young
Arabs filling their homes with every hadith collection they can lay their hands
upon, and poring over them in the apparent belief that they are less likely to
misinterpret this vast and complex literature than Imam al-Shafi'i, Imam Ahmad,
and the other great Imams. This irresponsible approach, although still not
widespread, is predictably opening the door to sharply divergent opinions, which
have seriously damaged the unity, credibility and effectiveness of the Islamic
movement, and provoked sharp arguments over issues settled by the great Imams
over a thousand years ago.[68] It is common now to see young activists prowling
the mosques, criticising other worshippers for what they believe to be defects in
their worship, even when their victims are following the verdicts of some of the
great Imams of Islam. The unpleasant, Pharisaic atmosphere generated by this
activity has the effect of discouraging many less committed Muslims from
attending the mosque at all. No-one now recalls the view of the early ulama, which
was that Muslims should tolerate divergent interpretations of the Sunnah as long as
these interpretations have been held by reputable scholars. As Sufyan al-Thawri
said: ‘If you see a man doing something over which there is a debate among the
scholars, and which you yourself believe to be forbidden, you should not forbid
him from doing it.’[69] The alternative to this policy is, of course, a disunity and
rancour which will poison and cripple the Muslim community from within.[70]
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In a Western-influenced global culture in which people are urged from early

childhood to think for themselves and to challenge established authority, it can
sometimes be difficult to muster enough humility to recognise ones own
limitations.[71] We are all a little like Pharaoh: our egos are by nature resistant to
the idea that anyone else might be much more intelligent or learned than ourselves.
The belief that ordinary Muslims, even if they know Arabic, are qualified to derive
rulings of the Shariah for themselves, is an example of this egotism running wild.
To young people proud of their own judgement, and unfamiliar with the
complexity of the sources and the brilliance of authentic scholarship, this can be an
effective trap, which ends by luring them away from the orthodox path of Islam
and into an unintentional agenda of provoking deep divisions among the Muslims.
The fact that all the great scholars of the religion, including the hadith experts,
themselves belonged to madhhabs, and required their students to belong to
madhhabs, seems to have been forgotten. Self-esteem has won a major victory here
over common sense and Islamic responsibility.[72]
The Holy Quran commands Muslims to use their minds and reflective capacities;
and the issue of following qualified scholarship is an area in which this faculty
must be very carefully deployed. The basic point should be appreciated that no
categoric difference exists between usul al-fiqh and any other specialised science
requiring lengthy training. Shaykh Saìd Ramadan al-Buti, who has articulated the
orthodox response to the anti-Madhhab trend in his book: Non-Madhhabism: The
Greatest Bida Threatening the Islamic Sharià, likes to compare the science of
deriving rulings to that of medicine. "If ones child is seriously ill", he asks, "does
one look for oneself in the medical textbooks for the proper diagnosis and cure, or
should one go to a trained medical practitioner?" Clearly, sanity dictates the latter
option. And so it is in matters of religion, which are in reality even more important
and potentially hazardous: we would be both foolish and irresponsible to try to
look through the sources ourselves, and become our own muftis. Instead, we
should recognise that those who have spent their entire lives studying the Sunnah
and the principles of law are far less likely to be mistaken than we are.[73]
Another metaphor might be added to this, this time borrowed from astronomy. We
might compare the Quranic verses and the hadiths to the stars. With the naked eye,
we are unable to see many of them clearly; so we need a telescope. If we are
16 | P a g e
foolish, or proud, we may try to build one ourselves. If we are sensible and modest,
however, we will be happy to use one built for us by Imam al-Shafi'i or Ibn
Hanbal, and refined, polished and improved by generations of great astronomers. A
madhhab is, after all, nothing more than a piece of precision equipment enabling us
to see Islam with the maximum clarity possible. If we use our own devices, our
amateurish attempts will inevitably distort our vision.
A third image might also be deployed. An ancient building, for instance the Blue
Mosque in Istanbul, might seem imperfect to some who worship in it. Young
enthusiasts, burning with a desire to make the building still more exquisite and
well-made (and no doubt more in conformity with their own time-bound
preferences), might gain access to the crypts and basements which lie under the
structure, and, on the basis of their own understanding of the principles of
architecture, try to adjust the foundations and pillars which support the great
edifice above them. They will not, of course, bother to consult professional
architects, except perhaps one or two whose rhetoric pleases them nor will they be
guided by the books and memoirs of those who have maintained the structure over
the centuries. Their zeal and pride leaves them with no time for that. Groping
through the basements, they bring out their picks and drills, and set to work with
their usual enthusiasm.
There is a real danger that Sunni Islam is being treated in a similar fashion. The
edifice has stood for centuries, withstanding the most bitter blows of its enemies.
Only from within can it be weakened. No doubt, Islam has its intelligent foes
among whom this fact is well-known. The spectacle of the disunity and fitnas
which divided the early Muslims despite their superior piety, and the solidity and
cohesiveness of Sunnism after the final codification of the Shariah in the four
Schools of the great Imams, must have put ideas into many a malevolent head.
This is not to suggest in any way that those who attack the great madhhabs are the
conscious tools of Islam’s enemies. But it may go some way to explaining why
they will continue to be well-publicised and well-funded, while the orthodox
alternative is starved of resources. With every Muslim now a proud mujtahid, and
with taqlid dismissed as a sin rather than a humble and necessary virtue, the
divergent views which caused such pain in our early history will surely break
surface again. Instead of four madhhabs in harmony, we will have a billion
17 | P a g e
madhhabs in bitter and self-righteous conflict. No more brilliant scheme for the
destruction of Islam could ever have been devised.[74]
Footnotes
[1] Abdul Wadod Shalabi, Islam: Religion of Life (2nd ed., Dorton, 1989), 10. This
is the purport of the famous hadith : ‘The best generation is my own, then that
which follows them, then that which follows them’. (Muslim, Fada’il al-Sahaba,
210, 211, 212, 214)
[2] The Khalifa was killed by Muslim rebels from Egypt, whose grievances
included his alleged ‘innovation’ of introducing a standard text of the Holy Koran.
(Evidently the belief among some modern Muslims that there can be no such thing
as a ‘good innovation’ (bidà hasana) has a long history!) For the full story, see
pages 63-71 of M.A. Shaban, Islamic History AD 600-750 (AH 132): A New
Interpretation (Cambridge, 1971).
[3] Shaban, 73-7.
[4] For the Kharijtes see Imam al-Tabari, History, vol. XVIII, translated by M.
Morony (New York, 1987), 21-31. Their monstrous joy at having assassinated the
khalifa Àli ibn Abi Talib is recorded on page 22.
[5] For an account of the historical development of the fiqh, see Ahmad Hasan, The
Early Development of Islamic Jurisprudence (Islamabad, 1970); Hilmi Ziya
Ulken, Islam Dusuncesi(Istanbul, 1946), 68-100; Omer Nasuhi Bilmen, Hukuki
Islamiyye ve Istalahati Fikhiyye Kamusu (Istanbul, 1949-52), I, 311-338.
[6] For a brief account of Shi’ism, see C. Glasse, The Concise Encyclopedia of
Islam (london, 1989), 364-70.
[7] Fada’ih al-Batiniya, ed. Àbd al-Rahman Badawi (Cairo, 1964).
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[8] For a detailed but highly readable account of the Mongol onslaught, see B.
Spuler, History of the Mongols, based on Eastern and Western Accounts of the
Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (London, 1972); the best-known account by a
Muslim historian is Àla’ al-Din al-Juwayni, Tarikh-i Jihangusha, translated by
J.A. Boyle as The History of the World-Conqueror (Manchester, 1958).
[9] For the slaughter of the ulema, see the dramatic account of Ahmad
Aflaki, Manaqib al-Àrifin, ed. Tahsin Tazici (Ankara, 1959-61), I, 21, who states
that 50,000 scholars were killed in the city of Balkh alone.
[10] The critical battle was fought in 873/1469, when the Mongol ruler of Iran was
defeated by the Turkomans of the (Sunni) Ak Koyunlu dynasty, who were in turn
defeated by Shah Ismaìl, an extreme Shiìte, in 906-7/1501, who inaugurated the
Safavid rule which turned Iran into a Shiì country. (The Cambridge History of
Iran, VI, 174-5; 189-350; Sayyid Muhammad Sabzavari, tr. Sayyid Hasan
Amin, Islamic Political and Juridical Thought in Safavid Iran [Tehran, 1989].)
[11] The Kharijites represent a tendency which has reappeared in some circles in
recent years. Divided into many factions, their principles were never fully codified.
They were textualist, puritanical and anti-intellectual, rejected the condition of
Quraishite birth for their Imam, and declared everyone outside their grouping to
be kafir. For some interesting accounts, see M. Kafafi, ‘The Rise of
Kharijism’, Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Egypt, XIV (1952),
29-48; Ibn Hazm, al-Fisal fi’l-milal wa’l-nihal (Cairo, 1320), IV, 188-92; Brahim
Zerouki, L’Imamat de Tahart: premier etat musulman du Maghreb (Paris, 1987).
[12] Probably because he had written a book celebrating the virtues of the caliph
Àli. See Ibn Hajar al-Àsqalani, Tahdhib al-Tahdhib (Hyderabad, 1325), I, 36-40.
[13] See, for example, Imam al-Haramayn al-Juwayni, al-Burhan fi usul al-
fiqh (Cairo, 1400), §§1189-1252.
[14] Ibn Qutayba, Ta’wil Mukhtalif al-Hadith (Cairo, 1326). Readers of French
will benefit from the translation of G. Lecomte: Le Traite des divergences du
hadith d’Ibn Qutayba (Damascus, 1962). There is also a useful study by Ishaq al-
Husayni: The Life and Works of Ibn Qutayba (Beirut, 1950). Mention should also
19 | P a g e
be made of a later and inmost respects similar work, by Imam al-Tahawi (d.
321): Mushkil al-Athar(Hyderabad, 1333), which is more widely used among the
ulema.
[15] Imam Abu’l-Wahid al-Baji (d. 474), Ihkam al-Fusul ila Ìlm al-Usul, ed. A.
Turki (Beirut, 1986/1407), §§184-207; Imam Abu Ishaq al-Sirazi (d. 476), al-
Luma` fi usual al-fiqh (Cairo, 1377), 17-24; Juwayni, §§327-52, 1247; Imam al-
Shafiì, tr. Majid Khadduri, Al-Shafiì’s Risala: Treatise on the Foundations of
Islamic Jurisprudence (Cambridge, 1987), 103-8. Shafiì gives a number of well-
known examples of Koranic texts being subject to takhsis. For instance, the
verse ‘As for the thief, male and female, cut of their hands as a retribution from
Allah,’ (5:42) appears to be unconditional; however it is subject to takhsis by
the hadith which reads ‘Hands should not be cut off for fruits, nor the spadix of a
palm tree, and that the hand should not be cut off unless the price of the thing
stolen is a quarter of a dinar or more.’ (Malik, Muwatta’, Abu Daud, Sunan; see
Shafiì, Risala, 105.)
[16] Mohammad Hashim Kamali, Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence (Cambridge,

1991), 356-65. This excellent book by a prominent Afghan scholar is by far the
best summary of the theory of Islamic law, and should be required reading for
every Muslim who wishes to raise questions concerning the Sharià disciples.
[17] The verses in question were: 2:219, 4:43, and 5:93. See Kamali, 16-17.
[18] Kamali, 150; Ibn Rushd, The Distinguished Jurist’s Primer, tr. Imran Nyazee
and Muhammad Abdul Rauf (Reading, 1994), 97. This new translation of the great
classic Bidayat al-Mujtahid, only the first volume of which is available at present,
is a fascinating explanation of the basic arguments over the proof texts (adilla)
used by the scholars of the recognized madhhabs. Ibn Rushd was a Maliki qadi,
but presents the views of other scholars with the usual respect and objectivity. The
work is the best-known example of a book of the Sharià science of ìlm al-
khilaf (the ‘Knowledge of Variant Rulings’; for a definition of this science see
Imam Hujjat al-Islam al-Ghazali, al-Mustasfa min ìlm al-usul, [Cairo, 1324] I, 5).
[19] Kamali, 150 quoting Shatibi, Muwafaqat, III, 63.
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[20] Kamali, 154-160; Baji, §§383-450; Shirazi, 30-5; Juwayni, §§1412-1454;

Ghazali, Mustasfa, I, 107-129. The problem was first addressed systematically by
Imam al-Shafiì. ‘There are certain hadiths which agree with one another, and
others which are contradictory to one another; the abrogating and the
abrogated hadiths are clearly distinguished [in some of them]; in others
the hadiths which are abrogating and abrogated are not indicated.’ (Risala, 179.)
For cases in which the Holy Koran has abrogated a hadith, or (more rarely)
a hadith has abrogated a Koranic verse, see Ghazali, Mustasfa, I, 124-6; Baji,
§429-39; Juwayni, §1440-3. The sunna is able to abrogate the Koran because it too
is a revelation (wahy); as Imam al-Baji explains it, ‘The Blessed Prophet’s
own sunnas do not in reality abrogate anything themselves; they only state that
Allah has cancelled the ruling of a Koranic passage. Hence the abrogation, in
reality, is from Allah, whether theabrogating passage is in the Koran or the Sunna.’
(Baji, §435.)
[21] For this as an instance of abrogation, see Shafiì, Risala (Khadduri), 133.
[22] Muslim, Jana’iz, 100.
[23] Kamali, 154.
[24] Kamali, 155; see also Shafiì, Risala (khadduri), 168.
[25] Sayf ad-Din Ahmed Ibn Muhammad, Al-Albani Unveiled: An Exposition of

His Errors and Other Important Issues (London, 2nd ed., 1415), 49-51; Ibn
Rushd, The Distinguished Jurist’s Primer, 168-170; Shafiì, Risala (Khadduri),
199-202.
[26] M.Z. Siddiqi, Hadith Literature, its Origins, Development and Special
Features (Revised ed. Cambridge, 1993), 3, 40, 126.
[27] Defects in the matn can sometimes make a hadith weak even if its isnad is
sound (Siddiqi, 113-6).
[28] Kamali, 361; Bilmen, I, 74-6, 82-4. The classification of revealed texts under
these headings is one of the most sensitive areas of usul al-fiqh.
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[29] Kamali, 361.
[30] Kamali, 362.
[31] Kamali, 235-44; Ghazali, Mustasfa, 1, 191,2; Juwayni, §343.
[32] For some expositions of the difficult topic of qiyas, see Kamali, 197-228;
Shirazi, 53-63; Juwayni, §§676-95; Imam Sayf al-Din al-Amidi (al-Ihkam fi Usul
al-Ahkam, Cairo, 1332/1914), III, 261-437, IV, 1-161.
[33] Kamali, 363-4.
[34] The accessible English translation of his best-known work on legal theory has
already been mentioned above in note 15.
[35] The question is often asked why only four schools should be followed today.
The answer is straightforward: while in theory there is no reason whatsoever why
the number has to be four, the historical fact is that only these four have sufficient
detailed literature to support them. In connection with the hyper-literalist
Zahiri madhhab, Ibn Khaldun writes: ‘Worthless persons occasionally feel obliged
to follow the Zahiri school and study these books in the desire to learn the Zahiri
system of jurisprudence from them, but they get nowhere, and encounter the
opposition and disapproval of the great mass of Muslims. In doing so they often
are considered innovators, as they accept knowledge from books for which no key
is provided by teachers.’ (Muqaddima, tr. F. Rosenthal [Princeton, 1958], III, 6.)
[36] These are (in order of length, shortest first), al-Khulasa, al-Wajiz, al-Wasit
and Basit. The great Imam penned over a hundred other books, earning him from a
grateful Umma the title ‘Hujjat al-Islam’ (The Proof of Islam). It is hardly
surprising that when the ulema quote the famous sahih hadith ‘Allah shall raise up
for this Umma at the beginning of each century someone who will renew for it its
religion,’ they cite Imam al-Ghazali as the renewer of the fifth century of Islam.
See for instance Imam Muhammad al-Sakhawi (d. 902AH), al-Maqasid al-Hasana
fi bayan kathirin min al-ahadith al-mushtahira àla al-alsina(Beirut, 1405), 203-4,
who lists the ‘renewers’ as follows: Ùmar ibn Àbd al-Àziz, al-Shafiì, Ibn
Surayj, Abu Hamid al-Isfaraini, Hujjut al-Islam al-Ghazali, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi,
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Ibn Daqaq al-Ìd, al-Balqini. Imam Ibn Àsakir (d. 571AH), in his famous
work Tabyin Kadhib al-Muftari fima nusiba ila al-Imam Abi’l-Hasan al-Ashàri,
ed. Imam Muhammad Zahid al-Kawthari (Damascus, 1347, reproduced Beirut,
1404), 52-4, has the following list: Ùmar ibn Àbd al-Àziz, al-Shafiì, al-Ashàri,
al-Baqillani, al-Ghazali.
[37] Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Ihya Ùlum al-Din (Cairo: Mustafa al-Halibi,
1347), III, 65.
[38] ‘The most characteristic qualities of the great ulema are dignity and serenity,
respect for other scholars, compassionate concern for the Umma, and following the
Prophet, upon whom be blessings and peace, whose view was always broad, his
wisdom perfect, and his toleration superb.’ Imam Yusuf al-Dajawi (d.
1365AH), Maqalat wa-Fatawa (Cairo: Majmu` al-Buhuth al-Islamiya, 1402), II,
583. `True fairness is to regard all the Imams as worthy; whoever follows
the madhhab of a Mujtahid because he has not attained the level of Ijtihad, is not
harmed by the fact that other imams differ from his own.’ (Shatibi, I`tisam, III,
260.) There are many examples cited by the scholars to show the respect of
the madhhabs for each other. For instance, Shaykh Ibrahim al-Samadi (d. 1662), a
pious scholar of Damascus, once prayed to be given four sons, so that each might
follow one of the recognized madhhabs, thereby bringing a fourfold blessing to his
house. (Muhammad al-Amin al-Muhibbi, Khulasat al-atar fi a`yan al-qarn al-hadi
àshar [Cairo, 1248], I, 48.) And it was not uncommon for scholars to be able to
give fatwas in more than one madhhab (such a man was known technically
as mufti al-firaq). (Ibn al-Qalanisi, Dhayl Tarikh Dimasq [Beirut, 1908], 311.)
Hostility between the Madhhabs was rare, despite some abuse in the late Ottoman
period. Al-Dhahabi counsels his readers as follows: ‘Do not think that your
madhhab is the best, and the one most beloved by Allah, for you have no proof of
this. The Imams, may Allah be pleased with them, all follow great goodness; when
they are right, they receive two rewards, and when they are wrong, they still
receive one reward.’ (al-Dhahabi, Zaghal al-Ìlm wa’l-Talab, 15, quoted in Saìd
Ramadan al-Buti, Al-Lamadhhabiya Akhtar Bidà tuhaddid al-Sharià al-Islamiya,
3rd edition, Beirut, 1404, 81.) The final words here (‘right … reward’) are taken
from a well-known hadith to this effect (Bukhari, I`tisam, 21.)
23 | P a g e
[39] Most notoriously N. Couson, Conflicts and Tensions in Islamic

Jurisprudence (Chicago, 1969), 43, 50, 96; but also I. Goldziher, Louis Ardet and
Montgomery Watt.
[40] It will be useful here to refute an accusation made by some Orientalists, and
even by some modern Muslims, who suggest that the scholars were reluctant to
challenge the madhhab system because if they did so they would be ‘out of a job’,
and lucrative qadi positions, restricted to followers of the orthodox Schools, would
be barred to them. This is a particularly distasteful example of the modern
tendency to slander men whose moral integrity was no less impressive than their
learning: to suggest that the great Ulema of Islam followed the interpretation of
Islam that they did simply for financial reasons is insulting and a disgraceful form
of ghiba (backbiting). In any case, it can be easily refuted. The great ulema of the
past were in almost every case men of independent means, and did not need to earn
from their scholarship. For instance, Imam Ibn Hajar had inherited a fortune from
his mother (al-Sakhawi, al-Daw’ al-Lami` li-Ahl al-Qarn al-Tasi` (Cairo, 1353-5),
II, 36-40). Imam al-Suyuti came from a prominent and wealthy family of civil
servants (see his own Husn al-Muhadara fi akhbar Misr wa’l-Wahira [Cairo,
1321], I, 153, 203). For examples of scholars who achieved financial independence
see the editor’s notes to Ibn Jamà’s Tadhkirat al-Sami` fi Adab al-Àlim wa’l-
Mutaàllim (Hyderabad, 1353), 210: Imam al-Baji was a craftsman who made gold
leaf: ‘his academic associates recall that he used to go out to see them with his
hand sore from the effects of the hammer’ (Dhahabi, Tadhkira, III, 349-50); while
the Khalil ibn Ishaq, also a Maliki, was a soldier who had taken part in the
liberation of Alexandria from the Crusaders, and often gave his fiqh classes while
still wearing his chain mail and helmet (Suyuti, Husn al-Muhadara, I, 217.) And it
was typical for the great scholars to live lives of great frugality: Imam al-Nawawi,
who died at the age of 44, is said to have damaged his health by his ascetic
lifestyle: for instance, he declined to eat of the fruit of Damascus, where he taught,
because it was grown on land whose legal status he regarded as suspect. (al-
YafiÌ, Mir’at al-Janan wa-Ìbrat al-Yaqzan[Hyderabad, 1338], IV, 1385.) It is not
easy to see how such men could have allowed motives of financial gain to dictate
their approach to religion.
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[41] A mujtahid is a scholar qualified to perform ijtihad, defined as ‘personal effort

to derive a Sharià ruling of the furu` from the revealed sources.’ (Bilmen, I, 247.)
His chief task - the actual process of derivation - is called istinbat, originally
signifying in Arabic ‘bringing up water with difficulty from a well.’ (Bilmen, I,
247.)
[42] ‘When Allah’s Messenger, upon him be blessings and peace, wished to send
Muàdh ibn Jabal to the Yemen, he asked him: ‘How will you judge if an issue is
presented to you for judgement?’ ‘By what is in Allah’s Book,’ he replied. ‘And if
you do not find it in Allah’s Book?’ ‘Then by the Sunna of Allah’s Messenger.’
‘And if it is not in the Sunna of Allah’s Messenger?’ ‘Then I shall strive in my own
judgement’ (ajtahidu ra’yi). (Abu Daud, Aqdiya, 11.)
[43] Kamali, 366-393, especially 374-7; see also Amidi, IV, 219-11; Shirazi, 71-2;
Bilmen, I, 247, 250, 251-2.
[44] Kamali, 386-8. Examples of such men from the time of the Tabiùn onwards
include ‘Ibrahim al-NakhaÌ, Ibn Abi Layla, Ibn Shubruma, Sufyan al-Thawri, al-
Hasan ibn Salih, al-Awzaì, Àmr ibn al-Harith, al-Layth ibn Sa`d, Àbdullah ibn
Abi Ja`far, Ishaq ibn Rahawayh, Abu Ùbayd al-Qasim ibn Salam, Abu Thawr, Ibn
Khuzayma, Ibn Nasr al-Marwazi, Ibn Mundhir, Daud al-Zahiri, and Ibn Jarir al-
Tabari, may Allah show them all His mercy.’ (Bilmen, I, 324.) It should be noted
that according to some scholars a concession (rukhsa) exists on the matter of the
permissibility of taqlid for mujtahid: Imam al-Baji and Imam al-Haramayn, for
instance, permit a mujtahid to follow another mujtahid in cases where his own
research to establish a matter would result in dangerous delay to the performance
of a religious duty. (Baji, §783; Juwayni, §1505.)
[45] Kamali, 388; Bilmen, I, 248.
[46] ‘The major followers of the great Imams did not simply imitate them as some
have claimed. We know, for instance, that Abu Yusuf and al-Shaybani frequently
dissented from the position of Abu Hanifa. In fact, it is hard to find a single
question of fiqh which is not surrounded by a debate, in which the independent
reasoning and ijtihad of the scholars, and their determination to locate the precise
truth, are very conspicuous. In this way we find Imam al-Shafiì determining, in
25 | P a g e
his new madhhab, that the time for Maghrib does not extend into the late twilight
(shafaq); while his followers departed from this position in order to follow a
different proof-text (dalil). Similarly, Ibn Àbd al-Barr and Abu Bakr ibn al-Àrabi
hold many divergent views in the madhhab of Imam Malik. And so on.’ (Imam al-
Dajawi, II, 584.)
[47] ‘Whenever a mujtahid reaches a judgement in which he goes against ijma`, or

the basaic principles, or an unambiguous text, or a clear qiyas (al-qiyas al-jali) free
of any proof which contradicts it, his muqallid is not permitted to convey his view
to the people or to give a fatwa in accordance with it … however no-one can know
whether this has occurred who has not mastered the principles of jurisprudence,
clear qiyas, unambiguous texts, and anything that could intervene in these things;
and to know this one is obliged to learned usul al-fiqh and immerse oneself in the
ocean of fiqh.’ (Imam Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi, al-Furuq (Cairo, 1346), II, 109.)
[48] The ulema usually recognize seven different degrees of Muslims from the
point of view of their learning, and for those who are interested they are listed here,
in order of scholarly status. (1,2) The mujtahidun fi’l-shar` (Mujtahids in
the Sharià) and the mujtahidun fi’l-madhhab (Mujtahids in the Madhhab) have
already been mentioned. (3) Mujtahidun fi’l-masa’il (Mujtahids on Particular
Issues) are scholars who remain within a school, but are competent to
exercise ijtihad on certain aspects within it which they know thoroughly. (4) Ashab
al-Takhrij (Resolvers of Ambiguity), who are competent to ‘indicate which view
was preferable in cases of ambiguity, or regarding suitability to prevailing
conditions’. (5) Ashab al-Tarjih (People of Assessment) are ‘those competent to
make comparisons and distinguish the correct (sahih) and the preferred (rajih,
arjah) and the agreed-upon (mufta biha) views from the weak ones’ inside
the madhhab. (6) Ashab al-Tashih (People of Correction): ‘those who could
distinguish between the manifest (zahir al-riwaya) and the rare and obscure
(nawadir) views of the schools of their following.’ (7) Muqallidun: the
‘emulators’, including all non-scholars. (Kamali, 387-9. See also Bilmen, I, 250-1,
324-6.) Of these seven categories, only the first three are considered to
be mujtahids.
26 | P a g e
[49] This is explained by Imam al-Shatibi in the context of the following passage,
all of which is quoted here to furnish a further summary of the orthodox position
on taqlid. ‘A person obliged to follow the rules of the Sharià must fall into one of
three categories. [I] He may be a mujtahid, in which case he will practice the legal
conclusions to which his ijtihad leads him. [II] He may be a complete muqallid,
unappraised of the knowledge required. In his case, he must have a guide to lead
him, and an arbitrator to give judgements for him, and a scholar to emulate.
Obviously, he follows the guide only in his capacity as a man possessed of the
requisite knowledge. The proof for this is that if he knows, or even suspects, that
he does not in fact possess it, it is not permissible for him to follow him or to
accept his judgement; in fact, no individual, whether educated or not, should think
of following through taqlidsomeone who he knows is not qualified, in the way that
a sick man should not put himself in the hands of someone whom he knows is not a
doctor. [III] He may not have attained to the level of the Mujtahids, but he
understands the dalil and its context, and is competent to understand it in order to
prefer some rulings over others in certain questions. In his case, one must either
recognize his preferences and views, or not. If they are recognized, then he
becomes like a mujtahid on that issue; if they are not, then he must be classed
alone with other ordinary non-specialist Muslims, who are obliged to
follow Mujtahids. (al-I`tisam [Cairo, 1913-4] III, 251-3.)
An equivalent explanation of the status of the muttabi` is given by Amidi, IV, 306-
7: ‘If a non-scholar, not qualified to make ijtihad, has acquired some of the
knowledge required for ijtihad, he must follow the verdicts of the Mujtahids. This
is the view of the correct scholars, although it has been rejected by some of the
Mu`tazilites in Baghdad, who state: "That is not allowable, unless he obtains a
clear proof (dalil) of the correctness of the ijtihad he is following." But the correct
view is that which we have stated, this being proved by the Koran, Ijmaànd the
intellect. The Koranic proof is Allah’s statement, "Ask the people of remembrance
if you do not know," which is a general (àmm) commandment to all. The proof
by Ijma` is that ordinary Muslims in the time of the Companions and the Followers
used to ask the mujtahids, and follow them in their Sharià judgements, while the
learned among them would answer their questions without indicating the dalil.
They would not forbid them from doing this, and this therefore constitutes Ijma` on
27 | P a g e
the absolute permissibility of an ordinary Muslim following the rulings of

a mujtahid.’ For Amidi’s intellectual proof, see note 51 below.
[50] A muqallid is a Muslim who practices taqlid, which is the Sharià term for
‘the acceptance by an ordinary person of the judgement of a mufti.’ (Juwayni,
§1545.) The word ‘mufti’ here means either a mujtahid or someone who
authentically transmits the verdict of a mujtahid. ‘As for the ordinary person
[àmmi], it is obligatory [wajib] upon him to make taqlid of the ulema.’ (Baji,
§783.) The actual choice of which mujtahidan ordinary Muslim should follow is
clearly a major responsibility. ‘A muqallid may only make taqlid of another person
after carefully examining his credentials, and obtaining reliable third-party
testimony as to his scholarly attainments’ (Juwayni, §1511). (Imam Ibn Furak,
however holds that a mujtahid’s own self-testimony is sufficient.) Imam Juwayni
goes on to observe (§1515) that is is necessary to follow the
best mujtahidavailable; whichis also the positoin of Imam al-Baji (§794). See also
Shirazi (p. 72): ‘It is not permissible for someone asking for a fatwa to ask just
anyone, lest he ask someone who has no knowledge of the fiqh. Instead it is
obligatory (wajib) for him to ascertain the scholar’s learning and trustworthiness.’
And Qarafi (II, 110): ‘The Salaf, may Allah be pleased with them, were intensely
reluctant to give fatwas. Imam Malik said, "A scholar should not give fatwas until
he is regarded as competent to do so both by himself and by others." In other
words, the scholars must be satisfied of his qualifications. Imam Malik did not
begin to give fatwas until he had been given permission (ijaza) to do so by forty
turbaned ones [scholars].’
[51] ‘The dalil for our position is Allah’s commandment: So ask the people of
remembrance, if you do not know. For if we forbade taqlid, everyone would need
to become an advanced scholar, and no-one would be able [have time] to earn
anything, and the earth would lie uncultivated.’ (Shirazi, 71.) ‘The intellectual
proof [of the need for taqlid] is that if an issue of thefuru` arises for someone who
does not possess the qualifications for ijtihad then he will either not adopt an
Islamic ruling at all, and this is a violation of the Ijma`, or, alternatively, he will
adopt an Islamic ruling, either by investigating the proofs involved, or by taqlid.
But an adequate investigation of the proofs is not possible for him, for it would
oblige him, and all humanity, fully to investigate the dalils pertaining to the issues,
28 | P a g e
thereby distracting them from their sources of income, and leading to the extinction
of crafts and the ruin of the world.’ (Amidi, Ihkam, IV, 307-8.) ‘One of
the dalils for the legitimacy of following the verdicts of the scholars is our
knowledge that anyone who looks into these discussions and seeks to deduce
rulings of the Sharià will need to have the right tools, namely, the science of the
rulings of the Koran and Sunna and usul al-fiqh, the principles of rhetoric and the
Arabic language, and other sciences which are not easily acquired, and which most
people cannot attain to. And even if some of them do attain to it, they only do so
after long study, investigation and very great effort, which would require that they
devote themselves entirely to this and do nothing else; and if ordinary people were
under the obligation to do this, there would be no cultivation, commerce, or other
employments which are essential for the continuance of humanity - and it is
the ijma` of the Umma that this is something which Allah taàla has not obliged
His slaves to do. … There is therefore no alternative for them to following the
ulema.’ (Baji, §793.)
[52] ‘There is ijma` among the scholars that this verse is a commandment to
whoever does not know a ruling or the dalil for it to follow someone who does.
Almost all the scholars of usul al-fiqh have made this verse their
principle dalil that it is obligatory for an ordinary person to follow a scholar who is
a mujtahid.’ (al-Buti, 71; translated also in Keller, 17.)
[53] See also Dajawi, II, 576: ‘The Companions and Followers used to
give fatwas on legal issues to those who asked for them. At times they would
mention the source, if this was necessary, while at other times they would limit
themselves to specifying the ruling.’ Al-Ghazali (Mustasfa, II, 385) explains that
the existence of taqlid and fatwa among the Companions is a dalil for the necessity
of this fundamental distinction: ‘The proof that taqlid is obligatory is the ijma` of
the Companions. For they used to give fatwas to the ordinary people and did not
command them to acquire the degree of ijtihad for themselves. This is known
necessarily (bi’l-darura) and by parallel lines of transmission (tawatur) from both
the scholars and the non-scholars among them.’ See also Ibn
Khaldun, Muqaddima (Bulaq ed., p. 216): ‘Not all the Companions were qualified
to give fatwas, and Islam was not taken from all of them. That privilege was held
only by those who had learnt the Koran, knew what it contained by what of
29 | P a g e
abrogated and abrogating passages, ambiguous (mutashabih) and perspicuous

(muhkam) expressions, and its other special features.’ And also Imam al-Baji
(§793): ‘Ordinary Muslims have no alternative but to follow the Ulema. One proof
of this is theijma` of the Companions, for those among them who had not attained
the degree of ijtihad used to ask the ulema of the Companions for the correct ruling
on something which happened to them. Not one of the Companions criticized them
for so doing; on the contrary, they gave them fatwas on the issues they had asked
about, without condemning them or telling them to derive the rulings themselves
[from the Koran and Sunna].’ See also Imam al-Amidi: in note 49 above.
A list of the muftis among the Companions is given by Juwayni (§§1494-9); they
include the Four Khalifas, Talha ibn Ùbaydillah, Àbd al-Rahman ibn Àwf, and
Sa`d ibn Abi Waqqas. Others were not muftis, such as Abu Hurayra, who despite
his many narrations of hadiths was never known for his judgements (§1497).
Shirazi (p. 52) confirms the obvious point that some Companions are considered
more worthy of being followed in legal matters than others.
[54] As we have seen above, the ulema regard a mastery of the Arabic language as
one of the essential qualifications for deriving the Sharià directly from the Koran
and Sunna. See Juwayni, §§70-216, where this is stressed. Juwayni records that
Imam al-Shafiì was so expert in the Arabic language, grammar and rhetoric that at
a very young age he was consulted by the great philologist al-Asmaì, who asked
his help in editing some early and very difficult collections of Arabic poetry.
(Juwayni, §1501.) We also learn that Imam Ìbn al-Mubarak, the famous
traditionalist of Merv, spent more money on learning Arabic than on traditions
[hadith], attaching more importance on the former than the latter, and asking the
students of hadith to spent twice as long on Arabic than on hadith … al-Asmaì
held that someone who studied hadith without learning grammar was to be
categorized with the forgers of hadith.’ (Siddiqi, 84-5.)
[55] Published in 6 volumes in Cairo in 1313 AH. Another work by him, the Kitab
al-Zuhd (Beirut, 1403), also contains many hadiths.
[56] Published in 13 volumes in Bombay between 1386 and 1390.
[57] Edited by M.M. al-A`zami, Beirut, 1391-97.
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[58] This is an important collection of hadiths who accuracy Imam al-Hakim al-
Nisaburi considered to meet the criteria of Imams al-Bukhari and Muslim, but
which had not been included in their collections. Published in four large volumes
in Hyderabad between 1334-1342.
[59] Needless to say, the amateurs who deny taqlid and try to derive the rulings for
themselves are even more ignorant of the derivative sources of Sharià than they
are of the Koran and Sunna. These other sources do not only include the famous
ones such as ijma` and qiyas. For instance, the fatwas of the Companions are
considered by the ulema to be a further important source of legislation. ‘Imam al-
Shafiì throughout his life taught that diya (bloodmoney) was increased in cases of
crimes committed in the Haramayn or the Sacred Months, and he had no basis for
this other than the statements of the Companions.’ (Juwayni, §1001.)
[60] There is a version of this hadith in Tirmidhi (Hudu, 2), but attached to an
isnad which includes Yazid ibn Ziyad, who is weak.
[61] Ibn Abi Shayba, Musannaf, XI, 70.
[62] Sakhawi, 74-5.
[63] Sakhawi, 742.
[64] For a complete list of the most famous scholars of Islam, and the madhhabs to
which they belonged see Sayf al-Din Ahmad, Al-Albani Unveiled, 97-9.
[65] For these writers see Ahmad ibn al-Naqib al-Misri, tr. Nuh Keller, Reliance of
the Traveller (Abu Dhabi, 1991), 1059-60, 1057-9. The attitude of Ibn al-Qayyim
is not consistent on this issue. In some passages of his I`lam al-Muwaqqiìn he
seems to suggest that any Muslim is qualified to derive rulings directly from the
Koran and Sunna. But in other passages he takes a more intelligent view. For
instance, he writes: ‘Is it permissible for a mufti who adheres to the madhhab of
his Imam to give a fatwa in accordance with a different madhhab if that is more
correct in his view? [The answer is] if he is [simply] following the principles of
that Imam in procedures of ijtihad and ascertaining the proof-texts [i.e. is
a mujtahid fi’l-madhhab], then he is permitted to follow the view of
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another mujtahid which he considers correct.’ (I`lam al-Muwaqqiìn, IV, 237.)

This is a broad approach, but is nonetheless very far from the notion of simply
following the ‘dalil’ every time rather than following a qualified interpreter. This
quote and several others are given by Shaykh al-Buti to show the various opinions
held by Ibn al-Qayyim on this issue, which, according to the Shaykh, reveal
‘remarkable contradictions’. (Al-Buti, 56-60.)
[66] Many of Ibn Taymiya’s works exist only as single manuscripts; and even the
others, when compared to the works of the great scholars such as al-Suyuti and al-
Nawawi, seem to have been copied only very rarely. See the list of ancient
manuscripts of his works given by C. Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen
Litteratur (2nd. Ed. Leiden, 1943-9), II, 126-7, Supplement, II, 119-126.
[67] Àbduh, in turn, was influenced by his teacher and collaborator Jamal al-Din
al-Afghani (1839-97). Afghani was associated with that transitional ‘Young
Ottoman’ generation which created the likes of Namik Kemal and (somewhat later)
Zia Gokalp and Sati` al-Husari: men deeply traumatized by the success of the
Western powers and the spectacle of Ottoman military failure, and who sought a
cultural renewal by jettisoning historic Muslim culture while maintaining
authenticity by retaining a ‘pristine essence’. In this they were inspired,
consciously or otherwise, by the wider 19th century quest for authenticity: the
nationalist philosophers Herder and Le Bon, who had outlined a similar revivalist-
essentialist project for France and Germany based on the ‘original sources’ of their
national cultures, had been translated and were widely read in the Muslim world at
the time. Afghani was not a profound thinker, but his pamphlets and articles in the
journal which he and Àbduh edited, al-Ùrwat al-Wuthqa, were highly influential.
Whether he believed in his own pan-Islamic ideology, or indeed in his attenuated
and anti-historicist version of Islam, is unclear. When writing in contexts far from
his Muslim readership he often showed an extreme scepticism. For instance, in his
debate with Renan concerning the decline of Arab civilization, he wrote of Islam:
‘It is clear that where-ever it becomes established, this religion tried to stifle the
sciences and it was marvellously served in its designs by despotism.’ (Reply to
Renan, translated by N. Keddie in An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political
and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jamal al-Din ‘al-Afghani’ (Berkeley and Los
32 | P a g e
Angeles, 1968), 183, 187. It is hardly surprising that Àbduh should have worked
so hard to suppress the Arabic translation of this work!
Afghani’s reformist ideology led him to found a national political party in Egypt,
al-Hizb al-Watani, including not only Muslims, but in which ‘all Christians and
Jews who lived in the land of Egypt were eligible for membership.’ (Jamal
Ahmed, The Intellectual Origins of Egyptian Nationalism (London, 1960), 16.)
This departure from traditional Islamic notions of solidarity can be seen as a
product of Afghani’s specific attitude to taqlid. But his pupil’s own fatwas were
often far more radical, perhaps because Àbduh’s ‘partiality for the British
authority which pursued similar lines of reform and gave him support’ (Ahmed,
35). We are not surprised to learn that the British governor of Egypt, Lord Cromer,
wrote: ‘For many years I gave to Mohammed Abdu all the encouragement in my
power’ (Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt [ New York, 1908], II, 180). An example is
the declaration in Àbduh’s tafsir (much of which is by Rida) that the erection of
statues is halal. The same argument was being invoked by Ataturk, who, when
asked why he was erecting a statue of himself in Ankara, claimed that ‘the making
of statues is not forbidden today as it was when Muslims were just out of idolatry,
and that it is necessary for the Turks to practice this art, for it is one of the arts of
civilization’. (C. Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt [London, 1933], 193-4.)
[68] A poorly-argued but well-financed example of a book in this category is a

short text by the Saudi writer al-Khajnadi, of which an amended version exists in
English. This text aroused considerable concern among the ulema when it first
appeared in the 1960s, and Shaykh Saìd Ramadan al-Buti’s book was in fact
written specifically in refutation of it. The second and subsequent editions of al-
Buti’s work, which shows how Khajnadi systematically misquoted and distorted
the texts, contain a preface which includes an account of a meeting between al-Buti
and the Albanian writer Nasir al-Din al-Albani, who was associated with
Khajnadi’s ideas. The three-hour meeting, which was taped, was curious inasmuch
as al-Albani denied that Khajnadi was stating that all Muslims can derive rulings
directly from the Koran and Sunna. For instance where Khajnadi makes the
apparently misleading statement that ‘As for the Madhhabs, these are the views
and ijtihads of the ulema on certain issues; and neither Allah nor His messenger
have compelled anyone to follow them,’ Al-Albani explains that ‘anyone’ (ahad)
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here in fact refers to ‘anyone qualified to make ijtihad’. (Al-Buti, 13.) Al-Albani
went on to cite several other instances of how readers had unfortunately
misunderstood Khajnadi’s intention. Shaykh al-Buti, quite reasonably, replied to
the Albanian writer: ‘No scholar would ever use language in such a loose way and
make such generalizations, and intend to say something so different to what he
actually and clearly says; in fact, no-one would understand his words as you have
interpreted them.’ Albani’s response was: ‘The man was of Uzbek origin, and his
Arabic was that of a foreigner, so he was not able to make himself as clear as an
Arab would. He is dead now, and we should give him the benefit of the doubt and
impose the best interpretation we can on his words!’ (al-Buti, 14.) But al-Albani,
despite his protestations, is reliably said to believe even now that taqlid is
unacceptable. Wa-la hawla wa-la quawwata illa bi’Llah.
[69] The ulema also quote the following guiding principles of Islamic
jurisprudence: ‘That which is wrong (munkar) need not be condemned as
[objectively] wrong unless all scholars agree (in ijma`) that it is so.’ (Dajawi, II,
583.) Imam al-Dajawi (II, 575) also makes the following points: ‘The differences
of opinion among the ulema are a great mercy (rahma) upon this Umma. Ùmar
ibn Àbd al-Àziz declared: "It would not please me if the Companions of
Muhammad, upon whom be blessings and peace, had not disagreed, for had they
not done so, no mercy would have come down." Yahya ibn Saìd, one of the great
hadith narrators among the Followers (Tabiùn), said: "The people of knowledge
are a people of broadness (ahl tawsià). They continue to give fatwas which are
different from each other, and no scholar reproaches another scholar for his
opinion." However, if ordinary people took their rulings straight from the Koran
and Sunna, as a certain faction desires, their opinions would be far more discordant
than this, and the Four Schools would no longer be four, but thousands. Should that
day come, it will bring disaster upon disaster for the Muslims - may we never live
to see it!’
One could add that ‘that day’ seems already to be upon us, and that the resulting
widening of the argument on even the most simple juridical matters is no longer
tempered by the erstwhile principles of politeness and toleration. The fiercely
insulting debate between Nasir al-Din al-Albani and the Saudi writer al-Tuwayjiri
is a typical instance. The former writer, in his book Hijab al-Mar’a al-Muslima,
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uses the Koran and Sunna to defend his views that a woman may expose her face
in public; while the latter, in his al-Sarim al-Mashhur àla Ahl al-Tabarruj wa’l-
Sufur, attacks Albani in the most vituperative terms for failing to draw from the
revealed sources and supposedly obvious conclusion that women must always veil
their faces from non-mahram men. Other example of this bitter hatred generation
by the non-Madhhab style of discord, based in attempts at direct istinbat, are
unfortunately many. Hardly any mosque or Islamic organization nowadays seems
to be free of them.
The solution is to recall the principle referred to above, namely that

two mujtahids can hold differing opinions on the furu`, and still be rewarded by
Allah, while both opinions will constitute legitimate fiqh. (Juwayni, §§1455-8;
Bilmen, I, 249.) This is clearly indicated in the Koranic verses: ‘And Daud and
Sulayman, when they gave judgement concerning the field, when people’s sheep
had strayed and browsed therein by night; and We were witness to their
judgement. We made Sulayman to understand [the case]; and unto each of them
We gave judgement and knowledge.’ (21:78-9) The two Prophets, upon them be
peace, had given different fatwas; and Sulayman’s was the more correct, but as
Prophets they were infallible (ma`sum), and hence Daud’s judgement was
acceptable also.
Understanding this is the key to recreating the spirit of tolerance among Muslims.
Shaykh Omer Bilmen summarizes the jurists’ position as follows: ‘The
fundamentals of the religion, namely basic doctrine, the obligatory status of the
forms of worship, and the ethical virtues, are the subject of universal agreement, an
agreement to which everyone is religiously obliged to subscribe. Those who
diverge from the rulings accepted by the overwhelming majority of ordinary
Muslims are considered to be the people of bidà and misguidance, since
the dalils (proof-texts) establishing them are clear. But it is not a violation of any
Islamic obligation for differences of opinion to exist concerning
the furu` (branches) and juz’iyyat(secondary issues) which devolve from these
basic principles. In fact, such differences are a necessary expression of the Divine
wisdom.’ (Bilmen, I, 329.)
35 | P a g e
A further point needs elucidating. If the jurists may legitimately disagree, how
should the Islamic state apply a unified legal code throughout its territories?
Clearly, the law must be the same everywhere. Imam al-Qarafi states the answer
clearly: ‘The head of state gives a judgement concerning the [variant rulings which
have been reached by] ijtihad, and this does away with the disagreement, and
obliges those who follow ijtihad verdicts which conflict with the head of state’s to
adopt his verdict.’ (Qarafi, II, 103; affirmed also in Amidi, IV, 273-4.) Obviously
this is a counsel specifically for qadis, and applies only to questions of public law,
not to rulings on worship.
[70] This was understood as early as the 18th century. Al-Buti quotes Shah
Waliullah al-Dahlawi (Hujjat Allah al-Baligha, I, 132) as observing: ‘The Umma
up to the present date … has unanimously agreed that these four
recorded madhhabs may be followed by way of taqlid. In this there are manifest
benefits and advantages, especially in these days in which enthusiasm has dimmed
greatly, and souls have been given to drink of their own passions, so that everyone
with an opinion is delighted with his opinion.’ This reminds us that Islam is not a
totalitarian religion which denies the possibility and legitimacy of variant opinions.
‘The Muslim scholars are agreed that the mujtahid cannot incur a sin in regard to
his legitimate ijtihad exercised to derive judgements of Sharià. [Only the likes of]
Bishr al-Marisi, Ibn Àliyya, Abu Bakr al-Asamm and the deniers of qiyas, such as
the Mu`tazilites and the Twelver Shià, believe that there is only one true ruling in
each legal issue, so that whoever does not attain to it is a sinner.’ (Amidi, IV, 244.)
This is of course an aspect of the Divine mercy, and a token of the sane and
generous breadth of Islam. ‘Allah desires ease for you, not difficulty.’ (Koran,
2:185) ‘I am sent to make things easy, not to make them more difficult.’ (Bukhari,
Ìlm, 12.) ‘Never was Allah’s Messenger, may blessings and peace be upon him,
given the choice between two options but that he chose the easier of them, unless it
was a sin.’ (Bukhari, Manaqib, 23.) But the process lamented in Dahlawi’s day, by
which people simply ignored this Sunna principle, has nowadays become far more
poisonous. What is particularly damaging is that egos have become so powerful
that the old Muslim adab of polite tolerance during debate has been lost in some
circles, as people find it hard to accept that other Muslims might hold opinions that
differ from their own. It must be realized that if Allah tells Musa (upon him be
peace) to speak ‘gently’ to Pharoah (20:43), and commands us ‘not to debate with
36 | P a g e
the People of the Book save in a most excellent way,’ (29:46) then how much more
important must it be to debate politely with people who are neither Pharoahs nor
Christians, but are of our own religion?
[71] Probably because of an underlying insecurity, many young Muslim activists

cannot bear to admit that they might not know something about their religion. And
this despite the example of Imam Malik, who, when asked forty questions
about fiqh, answered ‘I do not know’ (la adri) to thirty-six of them. (Amidi, IV,
221; Bilmen, I, 239.) How many egos nowadays can bear to admit ignorance even
once? They should remember the saying: ‘He who makes most haste to give
a fatwa, makes most haste to the Fire.’ (Bilmen, I, 255.) Imam al-Subki condemns
‘those who make haste to give fatwas, relying on the apparent meaning of the
[revealed] phrases without thinking deeply about them, thereby dragging other
people into ignorance, and themselves into the agonies of the Fire.’ (Taj al-Din al-
Subki, Muìd al-Niàm wa-Mubid al-Niqam (Brill, 1908), 149. Even Imam al-
Sha`bi (d.103), out of his modesty and adab, and his awareness of the great
complexity of the fiqh, did not consider himself a mufti, only a naqil (transmitter of
texts). (Bilmen, I, 256.)
[72] Cf. Imam al-Dajawi, II, 579: ‘By Allah, this view (that ordinary people should
not follow madhhabs) is nothing less than an attempt to fling the door wide open
for people’s individual preferences, thereby turning the Book and the Sunna into
playthings to be manipulated by those deluded fools, driven by their compounded
ignorance and their corrupt imaginings. It is obvious that personal preferences vary
enormously, and that ignorant people will arrive at their conclusions on the basis of
their own emotions and imaginings. So what will be the result if we put them in
authority over the Sharià, so that they are able to interpret it in the light of their
own opinions, and play with it according to their preferences?’
[73] Buti, 107-8. The same image is used by Imran Nyazee: ‘Taqlid, as
distinguished from blind conversatism, is the foundation of all relationships based
on trust, like those between a patient and his doctor, a client and his lawyer, and a
business and its accountant. It is a legal method for ensuring that judges who are
not fully-qualified mujtahids may be able to decide cases in the light of precedents
laid down by independent jurists … The system of taqlid implies that as long as the
37 | P a g e
layman does not get the training for becoming a doctor he cannot practice
medicine, for example. In the case of medicine such a person may be termed a
quack and may even be punished today, but in the case of Islamic law he is
assuming a much graver responsibility: he is claiming that the opinion he is
expressing is the law intended by Allah.’ (Introduction to The Distinguished
Jurist’s Primer, xxxv.)
[74] It hardly needs adding, as a final observation, that nothing in all the above
should be understood as an objection to the extension and development of
the fiqh in response to modern conditions. Much serious ijtihad is called for; the
point being made in this paper is simply that such ijtihad must be carried out by
scholars qualified to do so.
38 | P a g e

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Abdal Hakim Murad – Authority within Islam

Few people in the Islamic world bridge

So in the absence of authority, we see pragmatism winning over morality?

Do you think this situation will change?

And where do you place yourself in all of it?

Faith in the future

First Annual Altaf Gauhar Memorial Lecture

obviously, it seeks to capture, in the limited net of human language, something of

Behold and see! In Ind’s domain

Thou shalt not find the like again,

That, though a Brahman’s son I be,

Tabriz and Rum stand wide to me. [3]

It is our confidence, moreover, that this triumphant demonstration of Islam’s

As Muslims, of course, we believe that every culture, including the culture of

Fortuyn is not a marginal voice. His funeral at Rotterdam Cathedral, reverently

Fortuyn’s error was to impose a Christian squint on Islam. As a practising

Nonetheless, the irony remains. We are represented by the unrepresentative, and

Islam’s universalism, however, is not well-represented by the advocates of

Nonetheless, it is clear that the Christian and Jewish Enlightenments of the

The second dangerous consequence of ‘Enlightenment’, as Muslims see it, is the

political order, or with a democratic liberal arrangement that has no fail-safe

The humanistic revolt for the ‘liberation’ of humankind from centuries of

We European Muslims, born already amid the ambiguities of the Enlightenment,

Secularization increasingly becomes identified with two motives: the reduction of

Iqbal puts it this way:

One of Altaf Gauhar’s intellectual associates, Allahbakhsh Brohi, used the

We need a bi-focal vision: we must have an eye on the eternal principles

Traditional Islam, as is scripturally evident, cannot sanction either policy.

Calvin, The Epistles of Paul to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and

6. Roxburgh, 160, 169, 174.

7. The Independent July 28, 2002.

8. Peter Ochs, ‘The God of Jews and Christians’, in Tikva Frymer-Kensky et

9. Irving Greenberg, ‘Judaism, Christianity and Partnership after the Twentieth

12. Ibid., 22.

14. Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, cited in Allahbakhsh

15. Brohi, op. cit., 7.

16. David Hume, Essays (Oxford, 1963), 469.

18. This has been discussed with particular clarity by Michel

Islam and the New Millennium

Whoever is not thankful for graces

It took a Hungarian convert to Islam, Ibrahim Muteferrika, to change all this.

A no less lamentable ignorance prevails when it comes to non-ideological trends in

"The percentage of Christians in the world peaked at about 30 percent in the

costs are an increasing socio-economic burden. The UK Department of Health

Another example, also documented by Amnesty, is the export in 1990 of a

I believe that as technology improves, including ever more massive surveillance

In Algeria, too, throat-slittings and massacres of villagers, and fighting between

We sometimes like to dismiss these movements as marginal irrelevancies.

idh ja'izun ghufranu ghayri'l-kufri

since forgiving what is not unbelief is possible,

wa-man yamut wa-lam yatub min dhanbihi

Whoever dies and has not repented of his sin,

The legitimation of differences in fiqh was rooted in the understanding of ijtihad.

Here in England, global warming is noticed even by the ordinary citizen.

However, this figure does not include migrants generated by secondary

Let me close with some reflections on the above three themes.

Institutions, therefore, urgently need to be established, to train young men and

An alternative da'wa strategy already exists in a sense. In many of these countries,

As a Western Muslim, who understands what moves and influences Westerners, I

If we have the confidence to believe that what we have inherited or chosen is

Islam, Irigaray, and the retrieval of gender

What follows, therefore, is not an androcentric apologia, although a deliberate or

A second preliminary point raises the entire problem of gendered approaches to